Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  He added the following day:

  No news from Norfolk today … My letters by mail to day from N York announce the appearance of the Enemy Squadron. Whether a new force from Europe or that which was off the Delaware I know not but hope it will be found to be the latter I have been urging the Dispatch of our Frigates from New York and Boston but the weather and the slowness of recruiting has retarded their departure. I am extremely anxious, lest they would be Blockaded.49

  On March 3, Cockburn’s squadron arrived at Lynnhaven Bay and dropped anchor, and nineteen days later Warren in the San Domingo joined him. In support of the far more aggressive approach to making war that the government was now expecting, Cockburn was advised he was being sent an expeditionary force of 2,300 men, including two battalions of Royal Marines, each with 842 men and a company of artillery; a detachment of 300 regular infantry from the 102nd Regiment in Bermuda; and two “Independent Companies of Foreigners,” consisting of 300 French prisoners of war who had agreed to fight for Great Britain as “Chasseurs Britanniques” in exchange for their freedom.

  To “effect a diversion” that would draw American troops away from the renewed campaign against Canada that was fully expected with the coming of spring, the British expeditionary force was issued orders to capture or burn naval or military stores along the Chesapeake, levy ransoms against civilian property by threatening its destruction, and generally “harass the Enemy by different attacks.” While on “no account” were the British naval and military commanders to foment a general slave uprising—“The Humanity which ever influences His Royal Highness” must oppose a “system of warfare which must be attended by the atrocities inseparable from commotions of such a description”—they were authorized to enlist and guarantee the freedom of any “Individual Negroes” who offered their assistance to the British cause.50

  CHAPTER 7

  “You Shall Now Feel the Effects of War”

  Knives and saw for amputations (National Library of Medicine)

  WITH HIS usual paternalism, William Bainbridge summoned the men of the Constitution in Boston harbor on the morning of April 9, 1813, and gave them a lecture. “Sailors, in the action with Java you have shown yourself men. You are this evening invited to partake of the amusements of the theater; conduct yourself well. Suffer me not to experience any mortification from any disorderly conduct on your part. Let the correctness of your conduct equal your bravery, and I shall have additional cause to speak of you in terms of approbation.” And then the men marched off to Boston’s Federal Street Theater for a Friday night performance, impressing the rest of the audience with their “decent mirth and jollity” and the thundering cheer they gave Bainbridge, Rodgers, and other officers when they arrived in the stage box that had been specially “fitted up” for them with patriotic decorations, and impressing at least one newspaperman on the scene for simply making it back to their ship in one piece. “Among the ‘thousand ships’ of England, there probably is not a single crew, three-fourths of whom would not have deserted, had they been allowed an opportunity like this,” declared the New York Statesman.1

  Bainbridge had been asked by Secretary Jones what he wanted to do next, command a frigate for another cruise or superintend the construction of one of the seventy-fours with the command going to him upon its completion, and Bainbridge replied immediately with a letter to the secretary “asking your advise” on which to choose but making perfectly clear which he preferred:

  You ask me my dear Sir what are my intentions—wether to pursue the fickle Jade fortune, or ride under the lee of a 74 until she is in Commission.… I will merely state that in 16 years, I have spent very little time with my family—And when honored with the command of the navy yard here & the Station, the Government was so indulgent as to leave me the choice of remaining where my services I trust were useful, or to embark on the Ocean in pursuit of honor & danger—having been the Child of adversity I did not hesitate a moment in preferring the latter—I left my comfortable home in hopes that the fickle Goddess was tired of her freaks. At all events I was determined to pursue her until she should smile. Good luck attended me in having an opportunity to gratify my ambition & fondest wish—By going again in a Frigate, I might reap similar honors, but, probably, not greater. But in a 74, I should expect and confidently trust to add much—A British Admiral Flag, would be a glorious inducement for great exertions.2

  And so as Bainbridge had intended all along, Hull was bumped from the command of the Boston Navy Yard on March 15, 1813, and Bainbridge reclaimed the post he had come to view as his personal prerogative, taking up residence once again in the commandant’s house that his family had never left in the interim. While Bainbridge oversaw the construction of the seventy-four-gun Independence in Boston, Hull was shuffled off to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to take charge of the building of another of the new seventy-fours, the Washington. But Hull amiably went along with the arrangement, as did his new wife, who said she would be “satisfied with almost anything, provided he does not go to sea.”3

  The continued comings and going of American naval ships from Boston had earned Warren another withering from Secretary Croker; their lordships were quite aware that owing to contrary winds and fogs, “this Port cannot be effectually blockaded from November to March,” but the United States, Congress, President, and Constitution had all managed to get out to sea in October. Even with bad weather, a sizable force could have been dispatched a reasonable and safe distance from the land to try to intercept some of the American warships that had then continued to traipse in and out of the port as if they had not a care in the world: President and Congress had gotten safely back into Boston on the last day of December 1812, the Constitution had returned from its victory over the Java on February 15, and the Chesapeake joined them April 9.

  Then on April 25 Rodgers took advantage of a heavy fog, and squally weather that yielded a brief favorable wind, to slip out to sea right under the nose of the British frigates Shannon and Tenedos, which had been closely watching the port since arriving from Halifax in March. “It is with great mortification,” Captain Thomas Bladen Capel wrote Warren on May 11, “I am to acquaint you that … two of the Enemy’s Frigates (the President and Congress) have escaped from Boston.” Capel, in the seventy-four La Hogue and accompanied by the sloop Curlew, scoured the Atlantic from Cape Sable to Georges Bank trying to intercept either of the American ships, but they escaped this dragnet as well.4

  But the tightening British stranglehold on the American coast was telling everywhere. Two ships of the line and two frigates loitered off Sandy Hook and Montauk Point, sealing off Decatur in New York with the United States and his refitted prize the Macedonian. At Norfolk, the Constellation was for the moment safely holed up behind a floating gun-ship battery of thirty-four guns, a hastily erected artillery emplacement on Craney Island at the mouth of the harbor, and a line of blockships that had been sunk in the channel off Lambert’s Point barring the entrance to the Elizabeth River; but the natural and artificial facts that made Norfolk hard for the British to get into made it equally hard for the Constellation to get out of, and ever escape to sea. The Constellation’s captain, Charles Stewart, reported to Jones that many residents of Norfolk had fled in anticipation of a British attack on the town, and that some of the local militia had deserted from an apprehension that they would be ordered to serve on the undermanned gunboats. Jones replied promising all assistance and authorizing a reasonable recruitment bounty to make up the deficiency of crews for the gunboats, but cautioning that defense everywhere against a superior force was impossible: “The presence of a powerful hostile squadron is naturally calculated to excite alarm, thus we have urgent calls from Maine to Georgia, each conceiving itself the particular object of attack.”5

  The blockade had almost completely shut down the coasting trade, forcing shipments to go by land and creating commercial gluts and shortages. Philadelphia was cut off from the lower Delaware, and Baltimore was completely isolated from the sea; f
lour from the mid-Atlantic states that sold for $10.50 a barrel before the war was now going for $18 in Boston and $6.50 in Baltimore, where fifty thousand barrels piled up in warehouses. Baltimore newspapers began facetiously listing the movement of wagons in the style of shipping news items, telling how many days they had been on their journeys and reporting “no enemy cruisers” sighted on the way, but the thin humor could not mask the grim reality that shipping by land was slow, laborious, and prohibitively costly. One item that was reported without any attempt at jocularity read “Four wagons loaded with dry goods passed to-day through Georgetown, South Carolina, for Charleston, forty-six days from Philadelphia.”6

  Jones wrote to Eleanor that the disruption of water transport was already playing havoc with supplying the navy too: “In my Department I shall feel serious difficulty as we cannot as hitherto transport our stores from the places of deposit to where they are wanted.” In Boston the want of supplies had been responsible for the almost five-month delay in getting the President and the Congress back to sea after their safe return to Boston in December 1812. From Portsmouth, Hull wrote with the disturbing news that he could find only about two-thirds of the stockpiled pieces of live oak that had been cut for the frame of the seventy-four he was supposed to build; the rest had been cannibalized for repairs to other ships in the intervening years, which prompted Jones to reply in late April, “I can not but express my regret … particularly as the transportation by water is almost entirely cut off by the enemy.” Hull wanted to substitute white oak, but Jones thought some extra live oak timbers ought to be available in Boston, where frames for two complete ships had been stockpiled. Hull accordingly sent Bainbridge a series of increasingly urgent requests for timbers from the Charlestown Navy Yard; Bainbridge sent grudging replies and finally and only with great reluctance turned over a few pieces.7

  But throughout the difficult spring, Jones kept reminding his beleaguered commanders that retaliation, not defense, was the key to taking on a superior foe. “No reasonable man can suppose that our means are competent to the defence of the all against a superior force, which can be concentrated against any one point,” he wrote to Stewart at Norfolk. The object was rather to tie up as many of the enemy’s ships as possible by taking the offensive at every opportunity; as he wrote Stewart on March 27:

  It is some consolation, that while a strong squadron of the enemies Ships are employed in watching your little squadron & carrying out a Petty larceny kind of warfare, against the river craft & plantations, our gallant commanders are scouring the ocean, in search of a superior foe, & gathering laurels in such abundance, & in such rapid succession, as to afford the enemy scarcely time to soothe the chagrin of one defeat before he is subjected to the mortification of another.8

  The same day’s mail from New York brought news of the return of James Lawrence in the sloop of war Hornet from his cruise along the coast of South America. On January 24, 1813, the Hornet had been chased off the blockade of the Bonne Citoyenne at São Salvador by the arrival of a British seventy-four, but Lawrence had nimbly slipped away from the much more powerful enemy and stood out to sea. On February 4 he captured an English brig carrying $23,000 in specie. And then on February 24, nearing the mouth of the Demerara River, the Hornet fell in with the sixteen-gun British brig sloop Peacock and in fourteen minutes left her a sinking wreck, her captain dead along with thirty-seven other casualties to the Hornet’s three. The Peacock had been long known as “the yacht” for her resplendent appearance and immaculately polished fittings, and the accuracy of her crew’s gunnery in the brief fight had been abysmal. Although a subsequent British court-martial ran true to form in underscoring that there had been no want of courage displayed by the Peacock’s officers and men, and “honorably acquitted” the survivors, the court frankly attributed her defeat to a “want of skill in directing the Fire, owing to an omission of the Practice of exercising the crew in the use of the Guns for the last three Years.” It was the fifth American victory in a single-ship engagement.9 Joshua Keene, the Peacock’s steward, kept a small notebook of clippings he saved while a prisoner in New York, and one included the words of a chantey that Keene noted was making the rounds “about the Streets of New York”:

  Yankee sailors have a knack

  Haul away! yeo ho, boys

  Of pulling down a British Jack

  ’Gainst any odds you know boys.10

  THE CLOSE proximity of the British blockading squadrons to the American coast presented irresistible temptations to both sides in an era of less than total war. Warren’s orders to Cockburn instructed him to have as little communication as possible with the inhabitants of the coast “in order to avoid corruption, seduction, or the seeds of sedition being sown,” but from Norfolk, Captain Stewart wrote Jones that a steady stream of British deserters was showing up daily. Others were dying in the attempt: “Their naked bodies are frequently fished up on the bay shore, where they must have drowned in attempting to swim.”11

  The British ships’ need for provisions made it impossible to avoid contact with local citizens, who in many cases were all too happy to reap the benefits of trade with a cash-paying enemy. Cockburn encouraged local cooperation with the British force by offering to pay farmers along the Chesapeake well and in ready money for cattle and vegetables and other supplies they willingly provided, while seizing them by force if any resistance was offered to his foraging parties. And even as the war was becoming palpably more brutal and absolute, traditions of gentlemanly combat wove a crazy quilt of inconsistencies through the British blockade. The commander of an American militia regiment on Virginia’s Eastern Shore sent Cockburn a formal request that the packet sailing between Norfolk and Northampton be allowed to continue its regular service unmolested by the British squadron, and Cockburn returned an equally formal reply magnanimously granting the favor.12

  Secretary Jones complained bitterly about the “palpable and criminal intercourse held with the enemy’s forces blockading and invading the waters of the United States,” noting that both neutral foreign-flagged vessels leaving American ports and American coasting vessels “with great subtlety and treachery” were conveying “provisions, water, and succours of all kinds … direct to the fleets and stations of the enemy, with constant intelligence of our naval and military force.” Block Island, at the end of Long Island Sound, and Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, became virtual British ports, where ships of the blockading squadron regularly put in for water or other supplies. At Provincetown the squadron received fish, vegetables, and water, and the British captains furnished passes to several local owners of schooners allowing them to sail across Massachusetts Bay, through the British squadron to Cape Ann, to procure loads of firewood for them.13

  Even many stalwart Republicans winked at the illicit commerce when they were the beneficiaries. One prominent Maryland Republican from the Eastern Shore, Jacob Gibson, engaged in a pugnacious public correspondence defending himself after selling cattle, sheep, and hogs to the British. It did not help his case when it also became known that he had personally entertained Admiral Warren to dinner at his plantation on Sharps Island in the Chesapeake, and had received in return a protection from the admiral safeguarding his property and slaves and allowing safe conduct of his wheat crop to the mainland. But Maryland congressman Robert Wright, the same who had demanded “hemp and confiscation” for traitors, loudly offered his support for Gibson’s patriotism and assured him that “the enemies of your country” had signaled him out for attack only because of the conspicuous figure he cut in the Republican ranks. Other local Republicans acknowledged, however, that if Gibson had been a Federalist, “he would have been tarred and feathered and his house pulled down.”14

  Even harder to control was the illegal but absolutely booming commercial trade in British textiles, pottery, salt, sugar, and other goods smuggled in from Canada and the West Indies in exchange for cash, American produce, and naval stores. Congress banned all British imports in June 1812 with the a
dvent of the war, but the huge profits to be made from smuggling led to widespread and often open defiance of customs officials who tried to enforce the law. A huge trade through Spanish-owned Amelia Island, in the mouth of the St. Marys River in Florida, kept Georgia and much of the South supplied with British manufactures and other goods throughout the war. An army officer in Eastport, Maine, estimated that two hundred merchants in that town were involved in smuggling; when he tried to halt the illegal trade, he was threatened with tarring and feathering, and when he persisted, he was thrown in jail for a fictitious debt. In Plattsburgh, New York, another federal officer was thwarted when he discovered that even the local judges had a share in the smuggling trade. In New Orleans smugglers killed a customs official and wounded two others in one altercation and staged a raid on the customs house to recover their seized property.

  Merchants devised all manner of ingenious ruses to get around the law, including outfitting privateers that, sailing off the coast of Maine or on Lake Ontario or Lake Champlain or the St. Lawrence River, “captured” Canadian vessels filled with goods that had in fact been purchased by their own agents in Montreal or Halifax.

  The lack of a coherent policy in Washington and a welter of contradictions in the Republican party’s position on commerce made it difficult to marshal much public respect for the halfhearted government efforts to crack down on trading with the enemy. After initially seizing a flood of $18 million worth of British-made goods that were carried by returning American ships in the first months of the war, the Treasury first released them in exchange for penalty bonds put up by their owners, then offered to cancel half the forfeiture, then finally acceded to a congressional move to forgive the penalties altogether, in part to help bolster support for the war among the merchant classes.15