Perilous Fight
Page 23
Even when it was all over, the British would never understand what hit them. The court-martial of the Macedonian’s officers focused on Carden’s “over anxiety” to keep the weather gauge but showed no comprehension that he had been outmaneuvered from the start. Hope testified that he believed the key opportunity had been lost in not closing rapidly when they had a chance, and the fact was that Carden compounded his initial hesitation to risk a brief raking with his subsequent impetuosity in closing when it meant taking a long-drawn-out battering. Unlike Hull, who had used his windward position on the Guerriere to come up rapidly, but on a zigzag course that kept him from being raked each time the British ship fired and kept the enemy gunners guessing as to the proper lead to put on their aim, Carden had shown no finesse at all when he finally chose to close in on the United States. But the fact also was that Decatur’s maneuvering had left Carden no good choices: by wearing twice at the start, he had forestalled Carden’s plan to get past him and on his stern, and by keeping his distance during the heat of the battle, he had played to the advantage of his longer-range guns while forcing Carden to make that long, exposed approach.
A prize crew from the United States commanded by Lieutenant Allen quickly took charge of the British frigate. Lieutenant Hope was surly to the end, petulantly replying to Allen’s polite invitation to get into the boat by saying, “You do not intend to send me away without my baggage?”
“I hope you do not suppose you have been taken by privateersmen?” Allen answered.
“I do not know by whom I am taken.”
“Into the boat, Sir!”53
Allen put a guard on the officers’ baggage and sent it over later in the day and set the prize crew to work at once fothering two large leaks below the waterline by working a sailcloth under the ship’s keel. Seven feet of water was pumped out of the hold while the cloths temporarily held the sea from rushing back in. With that makeshift fix the carpenters could get at the holes from the inside to plug them more solidly, with wooden patches and oakum, while other work crews rigged jury masts. The work took five days; the whole time the two ships hove to along a well-traveled shipping lane. But Decatur’s luck held; the only vessel that appeared was a Swedish merchantman bound for Cádiz. Decatur allowed Carden to put his purser aboard carrying his official dispatch for the Lords of the Admiralty in London that began, “It is with the deepest regret I have to acquaint you …”
And then the two ships sailed for home, 2,200 miles across strangely empty seas, the British captain each day scanning the horizon in vain for a British man-of-war.54
AGAIN THERE were dinners and celebrations, salutes and odes; the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Virginia voted Decatur ceremonial swords; and after two weeks at Newport and New London, where the Macedonian was given a quick sprucing up, the ships arrived in New York, where the city presented Decatur with a gold box containing the Freedom of the City and still more honors, dinners, parades, theatrical tributes, everything else the city could think of to outdo what Boston had done to celebrate Hull’s victory. Decatur had put his prisoners ashore in New London when he arrived there December 4, installing them in a not very well guarded barn, and about a hundred promptly ran for it so that they would never have to serve in the British navy again. Samuel Leech slipped into New York City a few weeks later with the all-but-open conniving of the Americans, having earned money in the meanwhile by giving tours of the captured frigate to throngs of gawking sightseers. Several more of the prisoners signed on to the United States’ crew.55
One of Decatur’s lieutenants was Archibald Hamilton, the twenty-two-year-old son of the navy secretary, and Decatur dispatched him directly to Washington with his official letter announcing the victory. The young lieutenant made a dramatic entrance at a “naval ball” that had already been arranged for the evening of Tuesday, December 8, in the capital to honor Hull, Morris, and other officers of the navy. Bursting through the doors of the hotel ballroom at 10:00 p.m. bearing the Macedonian’s colors to a loud huzzah and the embraces of his mother and sisters, Lieutenant Hamilton knelt at the feet of Dolley Madison and laid the flag of the captured British frigate before her.
“This was rather overdoing the affair,” thought one of the guests, Mrs. Benjamin H. Latrobe. She was the wife of the British-born architect responsible for much of the Capitol, and she wrote a long, vivid, and drily humorous description of the scene to a friend, concluding seriously:
Now, between ourselves, I think it wrong to exult so outrageously over our enemies. We may have reason to laugh on the other side of our mouths some of these days; and, as the English are so much stronger than we are it is best to act moderately when we take a vessel; and I could not look on those colours with pleasure, the striking of which had made so many widows and orphans. In the fullness of my feelings, I exclaimed to a gentleman who stood near me, “Good Heavens—I would not touch that colour for a thousand dollars,” and he walked quickly away, I hearing the gentleman say, “Is it possible, Mrs. Latrobe.” I looked around and it was a good staunch Federalist from Rhode Island, Mr. Hunter, the Senator, so that I shall escape hanging after so treasonable a speech. I came home at 12 with a raging headache.56
Along with the exultation over victory came an outbreak of squabbling and jealousy among American naval officers. In a burst of enthusiasm over the Guerriere victory, Secretary Hamilton decided to promote Charles Morris directly from lieutenant to captain, which brought the secretary a deluge of outraged letters from other officers objecting to the decision, especially to the fact that Morris was being advanced two grades in a single leap. One master commandant complained that “if we are to be over topt by every brave Lieut on whom fortune may smile, there will be no stimulus left us”; an aggrieved lieutenant added that he “cannot discover from the Official letters of Captain Hull” that Morris “particularly distinguished himself any Special Act of Gallantry.” Bainbridge objected on behalf of several officers he wanted to see promoted, and Master Commandant James Lawrence threatened to appeal directly to the Senate to see his “legal rights” protected—and to resign from the navy altogether if he did not get satisfaction.57
The prize money that Decatur was due for bringing in an enemy ship of war was rapidly becoming another source of ill feeling. Under the navy department’s regulations, the officers and crew of a ship capturing an enemy of equal or greater force were entitled to share the full value of the prize but were awarded only half the value of a captured ship of lesser force. Two referees were named, one by Hamilton and one by Decatur, and they promptly decided that the Macedonian was worth $200,000, which was fair enough, but also that she was of greater force than the United States, which could only be described as a bald-faced lie. Like all British thirty-eights, she was a smaller ship than the American forty-fours, armed with fewer and lighter guns. The captain’s share, three-twentieths, put $30,000 in Decatur’s pocket.
It was up to Congress to decide whether to grant Hull and his crew a reward in lieu of prize money for having destroyed the Guerriere, and the House Naval Committee at first reported a resolution authorizing $50,000 total. Hull and Hamilton testified to the committee that $100,000 would be a fairer compensation, and the bill was accordingly altered. But faced with having to come up with $200,000 for the Macedonian, the House cut the award for the Constitution’s crew back to $50,000, leaving Hull $7,500.58 Hull, normally a modest man, was bitter and incensed and even two years later was still fuming about it, writing Connecticut’s senator David Daggett:
There has not been an action fought since, even by a sloop of war, but the commander has shared equal honors and more money. Look at the U States and Macedonian,—there Commo Decatur shared upwards of thirty thousand dollars, and for what? Because he was not so unfortunate as to shoot away her masts and got her safe in, for which he was allowed the whole of the ship, when the world knows that the Guerriere was a much heavier ship and the U States full as heavy, indeed heavier than the Constitution. Why such things are, I know not; bu
t they are facts.… when I am led to think on the subject of the Navy I cannot but feel hurt at many things relative to myself that have taken place.59
Decatur meanwhile backed out of a gentleman’s agreement he had made with Rodgers to “share and share alike” in all their prize money. Rodgers’s prizes about equaled Decatur’s by that point thanks mostly to Rodgers’s capture of a British post office packet ship, the Swallow, on October 15 near the Grand Banks, just a few days after he sailed from Boston in the President on his second cruise of the war. On board were eighty-one boxes filled with gold and silver specie, tons in all, worth $150,000 to $200,000. But Rodgers had little else to show for his considerable efforts, and for a second time he was left expressing his sheepish frustration to Secretary Hamilton. On this cruise he made only two prizes in two and a half months at sea, an even poorer showing than the six merchant ships he had taken in July and August on his first cruise of two months’ duration. “It will appear somewhat extraordinary,” Rodgers wrote Hamilton, “when I inform you that in our late cruise we have sailed by our log nearly 11’000 miles, that we chased every thing we saw, yet that we should have seen so few Enemies Vessels.” Decatur did not explicitly state to Rodgers the reason he now “would prefer going on our own accounts for the remainder of the war,” but he probably did not have to: fortune had chosen to favor him and not his comrade.60
Meanwhile, jockeying for the best ships only grew more intense as the tantalizing lure of glory grew brighter with Hull’s and Decatur’s victories. David Porter grumbled to Hamilton that the Essex was the worst frigate in the service due to her bad sailing and the idiosyncratic decision to arm her completely with short-range carronades, and insisted that he had a claim to exchange his command for the Adams: “An Officer junior to myself has command of a 36 Gun Frigate,” he complained to Hamilton. Lieutenants assigned to shallow-draft boats in out-of-the-way stations inundated the secretary with pleas for transfers to cruising vessels, citing years of service and the hardship “of my being Kept on a Station, where no opportunity could be afforded me to distinguish myself for want of proper vessels,” as one lieutenant wrote from New Orleans.
Hamilton had for so long been in the habit of deferring to his officers and letting slide the mounting administrative demands of his office that when he now occasionally tried to put his foot down it only led to derisive hoots from the press and contempt from his subordinates. The secretary petulantly replied to Lawrence’s threat to resign with a curt note that was widely reprinted in Federalist newspapers: “If (without cause) You leave the service of your Country, there will still remain Heros & patriots to support the honor of its flag.”61 Porter, who had sparred with Hamilton for months over his demands for promotion and choice of ships, had already turned against the secretary back in February 1812 when he wrote a colleague, “The secretary is unpopular here with the cloth, from the highest to the lowest he is disliked; it is supposed he has been too long in the habit of driving slaves to know how to regard the honorable feelings of gentlemen, added to his propensity to ‘toss the little finger,’ it is believed disqualifies him for the station.”62
There were indeed increasing rumors and stories that the secretary was spending most of his day drinking. In October a Boston newspaper ran a short item:
THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY
It is said, is fond of a glass.… would it not be better, that the department of the navy should be furnished with a secretary who likes business more than drinking? The tune of the cabinet seems to be:
Let the drums rattle,
We’ll drink and prattle;
Let the cannons roar,
Give us one bottle more.
Hamilton was reported to have been intoxicated at the naval ball in Washington in December and also two weeks earlier at a celebratory gala held aboard the frigate Constellation in the Potomac, attended by the president and the cabinet. The New York congressman (and physician) Samuel Mitchill commented in December 1812 that Hamilton suffered from “the too free use of stimulant potation” and was usually to be found asleep at his desk by noon each day.63 But it was Hamilton’s disinclination for business more than his inclination for drink that was the real problem. With the coming of war not even the surprising successes of the American navy could conceal the secretary’s fundamental incapacity for his job.
The presidential election in the fall of 1812 was a drawn-out affair, the results drifting in over the course of two months as each state voted according to its own rules. Madison’s chief opponent was a fellow Republican, New York City mayor DeWitt Clinton, whom the Federalists decided to support on the basis of his promise to promote commerce and end the war. Clinton ran a frankly disingenuous campaign, his northeastern followers vowing that their candidate would negotiate with the British for a quick settlement, his supporters in the pro-war southern and western states attacking Madison for not prosecuting the war vigorously enough.
Madison, for his part, was prepared to stake everything on the war. In late October, Secretary of State James Monroe replied to Admiral Warren’s armistice proposal by firmly shutting the door on any face-saving compromise that fell short of the aims the United States had gone to war to attain. Monroe stated that the president could not accept any peace terms that did not include a resolution of the issue of impressment. He proposed that the differences between the countries could be resolved by the United States’ agreeing to forbid by law the employment of foreign seamen in its merchant marine in exchange for a British agreement to cease its practice of impressing men from American merchant vessels. But he also insisted that any armistice, pending negotiation of a final treaty, had to include a British pledge to halt impressment immediately in the interim. Monroe insisted that the citizens of the United States could never appear to acquiesce in “a practice, which while it degrades the Nation, deprives them of their rights as freemen, takes them by force from their families and their Country, into a foreign service, to fight the Battles of a foreign power, perhaps against their own kindred and Country.”64 Though couched in diplomatic language, Monroe’s reply was clearly less an offer for negotiation than a pronouncement of American resolve aimed at domestic consumption.
“Day after day, like the tidings of Job’s disaster,” wrote Samuel Mitchill to his wife in late November, news of both military and electoral setbacks reached the “thin and solemn” gatherings in the president’s drawing room.65 On the Niagara and Montreal fronts, equally humiliating failures followed General Hull’s ignominious defeat at Detroit. Henry Dearborn, Jefferson’s secretary of war, was named to head the assault on Quebec, but he was fat, slow, sixty-one years old; his own troops called him “Granny.” The commander on the Niagara campaign was Stephen Van Rensselaer, a forty-eight-year-old militia officer with no previous military experience, a Federalist chosen by New York’s governor entirely in the hopes of shoring up political support for the war. In October and November, Dearborn and Van Rensselaer both launched attacks across the Canadian border with superior forces only to withdraw in failure.
By December it was clear that Clinton had carried four New England states, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and part of Maryland, but Madison took Pennsylvania and the entire South, delivering a 128 to 89 electoral vote margin. In late December, with his victory secure, Madison summoned Hamilton to the White House and told him that unless he resigned, Congress would never vote future appropriations for the navy. On December 30 Hamilton bowed to the inevitable and submitted his resignation, asking the president to state whether there was “anything in the course of my conduct, in that station, reprehensible.” The president’s reply the next day praised Hamilton’s “patriotic merits,” “faithful zeal,” and “unimpeachable integrity,” earning Madison a scornful editorial in the Federal Republican that mocked him for praising the virtues of a man he had just compelled to resign for his manifest want of them.66
ON DECEMBER 2 the Constitution had put in at Fernando de Noronha, a Brazilian island two hundred miles off the coas
t and one of several planned rendezvous points where Captain Bainbridge hoped to meet up with David Porter in the Essex, which had sailed from Delaware Bay on October 28. The Constitution had passed only a few ships on her way from Boston. A few days out, flying English colors, she had halted an American merchant brig, the South Carolina, bound from Lisbon for Philadelphia, and the boarding party kept up the ruse, telling the master they were going to send him into Halifax. At that point the American merchant captain produced a British license—and the Constitution took possession and ordered her into Philadelphia as a prize. The brig’s master “appeared much chagrined,” noted Amos Evans, and “said we had worked windward of him this time but he be damn’d if we ever did it again.”67
William Jones had suggested Fernando de Noronha to Bainbridge as a good resupply point if he decided to head for the coast of Brazil for his cruise: “It has a good Harbor on the NW side … Here you will find wood water and refreshments particularly turtle.” Jones also noted that no women were allowed on the island; it served as a Portuguese penal colony for “male exiles and convicts, who for their sins are deprived of all Sexual Intercourse.”68 The Constitution sent her boats ashore with water casks to be filled and the men returned with eggs, melons, coconuts, bananas, cashew nuts, and pigs. There was no sign of Porter, and so Bainbridge, pretending to be the captain of the British frigate Acasta, left a note with the island’s governor addressed to “sir James Yeo, of His Majesty’s frigate Southampton, to be sent to England by the first opportunity.” It read: