Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  Jones hated Washington society, dreaded the political attacks and slanders that he knew were to be his inevitable lot, missed his wife and home, but threw himself into the job with the encouragement of the many naval officers he knew and with a sense of urgency that the full discovery of the disorganized state of the office only galvanized all the more. “I can scarcely believe that you would have been drawn into Public life, knowing how little ambitious you are in that pursuit,” his old friend William Bainbridge wrote. “Yet it was what I most sincerely wished … You mention the inorganized state of your department. I well know it. And without reflecting on the former head of it (the last a person I sincerely esteem for the goodness of his heart) I can say there never was any system in it, and for the want of it great abuses have crept in. And you will find, my dear sir, that even with your capability & exertions, it will take some time before you can fully correct them.” Lieutenant George Read wrote from the United States in New York, “I see by the papers you are to be our secretary and permit me to say it is the best news not only to me but to all my profession, we have heard for some time.”37

  The mess that Hamilton left had settled deeply into the working of the office. The chief clerk, Charles W. Goldsborough, had let things slide as had his boss, and Jones decided immediately to get rid of him. “It required some little address to remove him from office without exciting his resentment,” Jones wrote Eleanor, but “I effected my purpose” by appealing to the “no small share of pride” he had detected in his character, allowing Goldsborough to present his departure as his own decision and letting him stay on “until it had the public appearance of his own act and convenience.” Jones dismissed another clerk whom Hamilton had apparently hired more out of pity for his impoverished state than for any ability he had; Jones informed the man, an unsuccessful physician named James Ewell, that “the necessity of substituting … an accurate and well qualified accountant and good hand writer” left him no choice.

  Jones’s new chief clerk fully confirmed the “exceptionally disordered and confused state” of the office that their predecessors had left them. Benjamin Homans was an experienced clerk as well as a former merchant captain; he had gained a good reputation for straightening out the office of secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when he held that post from 1810 to 1812, but even he seemed overwhelmed by “finding an office in such a state” as the Navy Department was. It was impossible to tell the state of supplies in the navy stores or gunpowder in the magazines. There was no regular system for resupplying each ship. “The Captains in the Navy have not made regular returns of their Muster Rolls on Sailing, and of their Prisoners on arriving in Port.” The wooden cases in the office are “almost useless for filing away letters & papers.” He discovered in the attic a room “filled with Books, old Letters & papers of various kinds (some important) in great disorder & dirty.” Most of the really important papers, though, were in the hands of the accountant, who jealously guarded them and made difficulties whenever Homans tried to examine them or ask a question about office matters. The constant stream of visitors through the clerk’s room made it hard to get any work done, and Homans wanted the clerks moved to a quieter room but told Jones he dared not propose “any innovation” himself as it “would be illy received and add to the jealousy and ill-will that appear to prevail against me.”38

  Jones for his part began to send out a veritable gale of orders and correspondence in his first few weeks, going over lists of officers for promotion or transfer, reducing and redeploying the infamous Jeffersonian gunboats—Jones told his brother that they were “scattered about in every creek and corner as receptecles of idleness and objects of waste and extravagance without utility”—demanding that “trees be cut down immediately” for needed timber, asking Congress for reforms in procurement procedures and authorization to hire two more clerks, appointing a competent physician to take charge and straighten out the haphazard system of naval hospitals, which offered equally haphazard care in inadequate temporary buildings scattered around the various ports. He ordered a systematic review of every officer’s fitness, requiring commanding officers to report on each of their officers upon their return from each cruise, or once a year on July 4 for those on shore duty, and developed a form for personnel files that listed mental and physical qualifications; proficiency in mathematics, grammar, and nautical astronomy; and “moral and general character.” He instituted a general order forbidding squadron or station commanders from making any more acting appointments as they had long been accustomed: that power was henceforth to be exercised solely by the secretary, and Jones rebuffed a protest on this point even from his old friend Bainbridge. He ordered junior officers to correspond with the Navy Department only through their superiors and stop bombarding his office with personal requests and complaints. The new secretary was on the job scarcely a month before he reprimanded or cashiered several officers who, through incompetence or corruption, had spent large sums without department approval. To a lieutenant who had purchased an unsea-worthy hulk without authorization Jones wrote a blistering dismissal: “Your irregular and extravagant conduct … prove you utterly unfit for the station with which you have been honoured. You are, therefore, dismissed from the service of the U.S.”39

  Every few weeks or sometimes every few days he wrote Eleanor, addressing her as “My dear wife,” “My beloved wife and friend,” signing his letters “Your affectionate friend,” “Your ever affectionate husband, W. Jones.” A few weeks into the job he described to her his new routine: “As to exercise, it is out of the question except the head and hands. I rise at seven, breakfast at nine, dine at half-past four, eat nothing afterward; at dinner take about four glasses of good wine, but have not drank a drop of any kind of spirit since I have been here. I write every night till midnight, and sleep very well when I do not think too much.” His doubts about his fitness for the job and the social role he had to fulfill, receiving and returning formal calls throughout official Washington, nagged at him. “I perceive that my domestic habits have utterly unfitted me for a courtier for all this gives me pain instead of pleasure.”40

  He found, though, that “the terrors” of the job “appear to diminish with the serious contemplation I have given the subject. Having accepted the trust with reluctance, but with the purest motives and most ardent zeal for the sacred cause of our Country why should I despair? My pursuits and studies has been intimately connected with the objects of the department and I have not been an inattentive observer of political causes and effects.” He tried to steel her for the “calumny” and “lashing” that he knew he must expect in public office. “If I am faithful and reasonably competent the consciousness of virtue and fidelity I hope will sustain me.… I have only to request you not to mind it when it does occur.”41

  To help smooth over his dismissal of Goldsborough, Jones agreed to his former clerk’s request to take over his $300-a-year lease on a house in Washington that Goldsborough could no longer afford, and to buy some of his furniture as well; the house, he told Eleanor, was located in the best situation in the district, halfway between the Six Buildings, on Pennsylvania Avenue at Twenty-first Street, and the Potomac River, with a fine view across to Alexandria. It was two stories tall, forty-four feet wide across the front, with a two-story piazza all along the back; an ell with storeroom, dairy, bathhouse, and library; a dry well in the cellar that went down forty-five feet with a windlass to lower meat and butter to keep them cool; and a garden with a variety of “choice vegetables, fruit trees, grapes,” stabling for a cow, and two fine clover lots.

  He was looking forward to having her “snugly located here” with him before long. He asked after their old dog: “Shake Bibo by the paw for me, but I suppose he is going the way of all flesh—and we must soon follow.”42

  A MONO THE inheritances left by Paul Hamilton to his successor was the ironic one of having finally persuaded Congress to approve the first new warship construction in a decade. Hamilton and his captains were
keenly aware that their sudden successes at sea had produced a political opportunity that needed to be turned to advantage at once. Hull, in Washington for the opening of the congressional session at the end of 1812, made the rounds lobbying with all the power of his new celebrity. “The Navy is now up,” Hull remarked, “and if nothing is done this session it never will be worth remaining any longer.”

  The first weeks of the session were filled with a furious debate on the war that brought all other business to a standstill. In June 1812, when the declaration of war was being considered, Federalists in the House had refused to participate in that debate as a protest against the Republicans’ insistence on a secret session; now, as war hawk John A. Harper of New Hampshire complained, the Federalists were taking the “opportunity to deliver themselves of their war speeches with which they were pregnant last session.” In long tirades, members of each party accused the other of exploiting the war for political ends. Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, charging that for twelve years the country had been mismanaged by “two Virginians and a foreigner”—meaning Jefferson, Madison, and the Swiss-born Gallatin—said that the real purpose of the war was to ensure that the Virginian dynasty remained unbroken with Monroe (“James II”) succeeding Madison (“James I”). Republicans in turn accused Federalists of secretly plotting a treasonous separate peace between the New England states and Britain, and argued that if Federalists really wanted peace the best way to bring it about would be to wholeheartedly support the war, so as to bring it to a quick and favorable conclusion.

  Another lengthy debate was occasioned by Madison’s proposal to enact into law the American bargaining position on impressment that the British had already rejected, namely that the United States would bar foreign sailors from the American merchant service in exchange for an end to the British practice of stopping and searching American ships and removing those it claimed as British subjects. More an effort at public relations than diplomacy, it was clearly an attempt to justify the war in the wake of the British repeal of the orders in council, and Federalists denounced it as a meaningless gesture while some of the war hawk Republicans opposed it as craven; but as Madison shrewdly calculated, it put the Federalists in a corner and enough members of both parties found it impossible to oppose the bill, which was passed and signed into law.43

  A surprisingly large number of Republicans still saw no inconsistency in opposing new appropriations for the navy even as they denounced opposition to the war as tantamount to treason. But on December 23, 1812, enough broke ranks with the party’s solid antinavalist tradition to join every Federalist in passing a naval expansion bill; by a 70–56 vote the House approved the construction of six new forty-four-gun frigates plus four of the long-planned and long-delayed seventy-tour-gun ships of the line. The Senate passed the bill on an unrecorded vote a week earlier. The total construction costs were estimated at $2.5 million, and the increased annual expense for the new ships was $1.5 million. Treasury Secretary Gallatin’s budget estimates for 1813 projected a $19 million shortfall even without any increases for the army or navy, and with Congress stubbornly refusing even to consider reviving the hated internal taxes of the Adams administration and the prospects of raising a loan of that size seemingly unattainable, Gallatin wrote to Jones in February proposing that the new shipbuilding program simply be scrapped. But as Hull had correctly observed, the navy was “up,” and Jones ordered work on the new frigates and seventy-fours to begin without delay.44

  In one sense this was all well and good, but the new navy secretary had another idea entirely about the best way to counter the Royal Navy on the high seas, and that was not to try to beat them at their own game. The American navy could never win a sustained war of attrition against the British, fighting warship to warship, “man to man and gun to gun,” as Jones would later put it, no matter how thrilling and encouraging the three single-frigate victories had been.45 Nor could America directly oppose the British blockade or protect American commerce from the overwhelming might the enemy could bring to bear upon the coastline.

  On February 22, 1813, Jones sent a circular to all his captains in port, laying down the strategy of hit-and-run raiding the American navy would henceforth pursue. Rather than strike the enemy where he was strongest, the American navy would seek to draw away as much of his force as possible by striking him where he was weakest, going after British commerce on the high seas, from the southern tip of Africa to the southern tip of Ireland:

  There is good reason to expect, a very considerable augmentation of the Naval force of the enemy on our coast the ensuing Spring; & it will be perceived that his policy will be to blockade our Ships of War in our own harbors; intercepting our private cruisers, prizes and trade, and Harass the seaboard.

  Our great inferiority in naval strength, does not permit us to meet them on his ground without hazarding the precious Germ of our national glory.—we have however the means of creating a powerful diversion, & of turning the Scale of annoyance against the enemy. It is therefore intended, to dispatch all our public ships, now in Port, as soon as possible, in such positions as may be best adapted to destroy the Commerce of the enemy, from the Cape of Goodhope, to Cape Clear, and continue out as long as the means of subsistence can be procured abroad, in any quarter.

  If any thing can draw, the attention of the enemy, from the annoyance of our coast, for the protection of his own, rich & exposed Commercial fleets, it will be a course of this nature, & if this effect can be produced, the two fold object of increasing the pressure upon the enemy and relieving ourselves, will be attained.

  Cruizing singly, will also afford to our gallant Commanders, a fair oppertunity of displaying distinctly their Judgement, skill & enterprize, and of reaping the laurel of Fame, and its solid appendages.46

  While the secretary said he would welcome the commanders’ proposals for where they would wish to cruise, he also made it clear that unlike his predecessor he intended to issue the final orders, to coordinate the effort and cover as wide a range of the seas as possible. The very same day, Jones wrote the chairman of the Senate’s Naval Committee, Samuel Smith of Maryland, asking for an additional appropriation for eighteen-gun sloops of war—which the new secretary argued would be the most effective weapons in the coming commerce war that he envisioned as America’s best riposte to British naval power. These were like smaller versions of a frigate; strongly built, ship-rigged with three masts but barely half the length and a third the tonnage of the Constitution and her sister ships, sloops of war could be built in as little as three or four months, much more quickly than the new frigates and seventy-tours, and would deliver much greater results for the price, about $75,000 apiece including construction costs, four months’ provisions, and two months’ wages in advance for the crew.

  “Their force is inferior only to a frigate,” Jones wrote the senator, “their cost and expenditure only about one third in actual Service; and in pursuit of the Commerce and light cruisers of the enemy three Sloops of the class proposed may reasonably be expected to produce a much greater effect than a single Frigate.… Aided by these vessels our Frigates would be enabled to take a wider range in pursuit of higher game.”47 Less than two weeks later Congress approved the construction of six additional sloops of war of the type Jones requested.

  ON THE FIRST day of February 1813, with ice making fast in Annapolis harbor, the frigate Constellation got under way, heading down the Chesapeake for Hampton Roads. Three days later, approaching the capes that flanked the entrance to the Atlantic, the American ship ran straight into two British ships of the line, three frigates, a brig, and a schooner just entering the bay. Charles Stewart, the Constellation’s captain, made a quick decision to make a run for Norfolk, and the winds being calm, he ordered the boats out to kedge the ship to safety.

  The tide was running out and so was Stewart’s luck, it seemed, as the ship stuck on the mudflats at the mouth of the tidal James River. There the ship was held fast throughout the day as the crew labored to l
ighten her by starting her water and removing stores as the British squadron hovered cautiously off, out of gunshot and facing a contrary wind and unfamiliar shoal waters. By seven o’clock in the evening the rising tide lifted the Constellation off the flats, and the boats were able to tow her under the guns of Fort Norfolk. “From the first I was desirous of avoiding this place,” Stewart reported to Secretary Jones; it was too easy to be trapped by the enemy. That same evening the British ships dropped down and anchored at Lynnhaven Bay, effectively sealing off the Constellation’s escape route to the sea.

  Jones sent hasty orders to shore up the defenses of Norfolk, close off the entrance to the harbor with a line of gunboats, and dispatch a fasts ailing pilot boat to warn incoming merchant vessels of the British blockade.48

  To Eleanor he wrote a few weeks later:

  There is great anxiety for Norfolk. The force of the Enemy is very great and may probably succeed in their main object the destruction of the Frigate and Navy Yard, but they will pay dearly for it. All that could be done on our part has been done—it has been impossible to get men sufficient for the Gun Boats there but if they were all manned and the enemy is determined to make the sacrifice it would make no difference.