Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  The American warships were secure: they were also impotent. New London’s merchants had never been much in sympathy with the war, and now that their harbor was blockaded they were even less so. More than a few scornful comments about the erstwhile hero Decatur’s newfound timidity began circulating. Decatur complained that the town was “utterly out of joint” with the war, the navy, and even his own predicament. At the end of the year he claimed he had been unable to escape to sea because traitorous citizens in New London had been making secret signals with “blue lights” to inform the British squadron of his planned movements, a charge that brought more derisive comments his way. Decatur admitted that other than having seen the lights—which he said had been burned from “both the points at the river’s mouth”—he had been unable to substantiate the story that he was being betrayed, and there was much that was absurd about it on its face: it was the sort of hysterical wartime rumor that always circulates, and the fact was that the lights probably came from ordinary fishing boats. The two frigates would be trapped there for the rest of the war.41

  THE BRITISH fixation was not just with the Macedonian but with all the American frigates that had come to seem a reproach to British honor, and honor along with other distractions kept playing havoc with Warren’s efforts to implement the steady escalation of overwhelming force that the blockade strategy demanded through the spring and summer of 1813. Even Broke’s morale-energizing triumph over the Chesapeake had come at a significant cost to the blockade: directly contravening the Admiralty’s stern admonitions to Warren regarding Boston harbor, Broke had deliberately weakened his force to entice Lawrence into a duel, and then for two weeks afterward the station was abandoned altogether as the Shannon sailed to Halifax with her prize. American privateers and letter-of-marque traders used their absence to escape to sea while merchantmen and privateers’ prizes rushed in—as did the American navy brig Siren from New Orleans. The day after news of Broke’s victory arrived in London, Croker sent a scathing rebuke to Sawyer’s successor in Halifax, Rear Admiral Edward Griffith, demanding to know in the name of their lordships why “the Shannon and Tenedos, and sometimes the former alone, have been employed in blockading the Port of Boston, when they had hoped that a Line of Battle Ship had been ordered to assist in performing that Service.” Every blockading squadron was to have a ship of the line constantly attached to it, “it being of the utmost importance that the Enemy’s Ships should be intercepted on their return.” The admiral was to dispatch a ship of the line plus two or more frigates at once to Boston to be “constantly employed in blockading that port” and was to call on the captain of the seventy-four La Hogue “to account for not having done so, transmitting his report to me.”42 On June 8 the Argus had used the similar absence of the entire British blockading squadron from Sandy Hook to put out unmolested to sea, not sighting an enemy vessel at all until she was seventy miles off the coast, and then dodged those British warships—part of the reinforcements heading for the Chesapeake—by ducking into a fog bank and making good her escape.43

  On the Chesapeake the Constellation remained a magnet for Warren’s and Cockburn’s attentions, even as the Admiralty ordered Warren to extend and intensify the blockade up and down the coast. An instruction had arrived from Lord Melville in May telling Warren to proclaim an extension of the blockade to include all ports to the south of Rhode Island, including the Mississippi River:

  We do not intend this as a mere paper blockade, but as a complete stop to all trade & intercourse by Sea with those Ports … If you find that this cannot be done without abandoning for a time the interruption which you appear to be giving to the internal navigation of the Chesapeake, the latter object must be given up, & you must be content with blockading its entrance & sending in occasionally your cruisers for the purpose of harassing & annoyance. I do not avert to enterprizes which you may propose to undertake with the aid of the Troops.

  Croker added one of his usual hectoring follow-ups. He stressed to Warren that while His Majesty’s government had found it useful to publicly declare blockades “of certain Ports only, because it is considered that for these purposes your Force will be always adequate,” that was in no way to be misunderstood by the admiral as relieving him of the obligation to do more; “their Lordships expect and direct you to maintain a blockade de facto of every Port to which your force may be adequate and which shall afford any facilities either to the Privateers or Merchant Ships of the Enemy.” He was to crush any attempts by the enemy to evade the blockade by shifting activity to other ports. He was not to neglect the “still more important” point of “affording to the British Trade frequent and adequate Convoys.” The secretary helpfully concluded by explaining to Warren, “By an attention to this point … the resources of the Enemy will be crippled and impaired and the Commerce of His Majesty’s Subjects facilitated & protected.”44

  In March 1813 Cockburn had made three attempts to take the Constellation in boat attacks, all of them repulsed; the next month, while still awaiting the arrival of the two thousand troops that had been promised him, he launched a series of marauding attacks up and down the inlets of the Chesapeake. Leaving a small detachment behind at Norfolk to keep an eye on the Constellation, Warren in his flagship San Domingo led the entire fleet northward; off Annapolis, Warren dropped anchor with the main body of the force to threaten Baltimore as Cockburn proceeded farther up the bay in the seventy-four Marlborough accompanied by the frigate Maidstone, the brigs Fantome and Mohawk, and three tenders. Cockburn had earlier snapped up four privateer and letter-of-marque schooners, each armed with a half-dozen to a dozen guns, and then quickly manned them and sailed them into narrow inlets and in a few days took thirty-six more prizes from their unsuspecting crews, who recognized the schooners and did not realize until much too late their new character. As the bay grew shallower, the Marlborough could no longer proceed and Cockburn transferred to the Maidstone. At dawn on April 29 at the very top of the bay, Cockburn’s men appeared off the town of Frenchtown, rowing for the shallow shore in launches, each mounted with a small swivel gun. Along with his ships’ companies Cockburn had under his command the “naval brigade,” a selected detachment of 180 sailors and 200 Royal Marines to carry out raids ashore, and as the launches began firing, a landing party got ashore and flanked a small Maryland militia unit manning a battery of six guns and quickly swept them aside. The British troops burned flour stocks and a few small arms caches and reembarked with total casualties of one man slightly wounded.

  A few days later Cockburn’s force was passing the mouth of the Susquehanna River when, as he reported to Admiral Warren, “I observed guns fired and American Colours hoisted at a Battery lately erected at Havre-de-Grace at the entrance to the Susquehanna River, this of course immediately gave to the Place an Importance which I had not before attached to it.” Cockburn’s whole attitude toward the Americans was as if they were already an occupied or subject people who had no legitimate right to resist British arms. Havre de Grace was a small town of no discernible strategic significance, but Cockburn at once “determined on attacking it” after this defiant show of American sovereignty. Having previously sounded the waters, he knew that only boats would be able to approach safely. At midnight on May 2, he sent 150 men into the boats to take up positions under cover of dark and be ready to attack at dawn.45

  Again the fire from the British launches and a British assault party quickly silenced the American battery. Along with the small guns on the British boats was a “rocket boat” that carried Congreve rockets. They were remarkably inaccurate weapons, but Cockburn placed great faith in them. Propelled by black powder charges and carrying solid, shrapnel, or exploding warheads of twelve to forty-two pounds, they had a range of up to two miles and an undeniable terror-inducing effect as they hissed and whizzed along their arcing trajectories. But they were almost completely unpredictable and sometimes gyrated wildly or even reversed course, sending their firing crews fleeing for cover. At Havre de Grace a Maryland
militiaman became the only known fatality from a Congreve rocket during the entire war.46

  After being routed from the battery, the American militiamen kept up the fight, to Cockburn’s outrage: “No longer feeling themselves equal to a manly and open Resistance, they commenced a teazing and irritating fire from behind their Houses, Walls, Trees &c.” The British party chased the Americans into the woods but, having then “decided it would not be prudent to pursue them further,” turned their attention to destroying the town: in order, Cockburn explained, that the townspeople might “understand and feel what they were liable to bring upon themselves by building Batteries and acting toward us with so much Rancor.” The guns of the captured battery were turned on the town, and two-thirds of the sixty houses were then put to the torch. “You shall now feel the effects of war,” one British officer told residents just before the orders were given to set fire to the houses.47

  One of those was the home of Commodore Rodgers, who had been the British navy’s bête noire ever since the Little Belt affair. According to a story that (true or not) circulated widely among British naval officers, Admiral Warren himself received some of the spoils of the plundering of Rodgers’s home. Sir David Milne, a British admiral who would command a ship of the line on the American station in 1814, wrote a relation that he had heard that Rodgers’s “pianoforte is in Sir John’s house in Bermuda, and he was riding in his, the Commodore’s, carriage at Halifax.” Milne added: “What do you think of a British Admiral and Commander-in-Chief? This is not the way to conquer America.”48

  Cockburn reembarked his men and took a small detachment a few miles up the river to the cannon foundry at Principio, where “without difficulty” he destroyed forty-five guns, including twenty-eight fully finished thirty-two-pounders. Again total British casualties were one wounded: Cockburn’s first lieutenant was shot through the hand.

  Three days later, Cockburn returned to the top of the bay, planning to attack two more small towns, Georgetown and Fredericktown, located a short way up the Sassafras River—“being the only River or Place of Shelter for Vessels at this upper Extremity of the Chesapeake which I had not examined and cleared,” Cockburn reported to Warren. Nearing the towns, the British flotilla caught a small boat carrying two local residents, and Cockburn used them to deliver an ultimatum:

  I sent forward the two Americans in their Boat to warn their Countrymen against acting in the same rash manner as the People of Havre-de-Grace had done, assuring them if they did that their Towns would inevitably meet with similar Fate, but on the contrary, if they did not attempt Resistance no Injury should be done to them or their Towns, that Vessels and Public Property only, would be seized, that the strictest Discipline would be maintained, and that whatever Provisions or other Property I might require for the use of the Squadron should be instantly paid for at its fullest Value. After having allowed sufficient Time for this Message to be digested and their Resolution taken thereon I directed the boats to advance and I am sorry to say I soon found the more unwise alternative was adopted.49

  The houses of the towns were burned, along with four vessels lying in the river and some stores of sugar, lumber, leather, and other merchandise.

  The raids certainly had the effect of spreading panic and fury throughout the region. Cockburn became the most hated man in America. The Weekly Register in Baltimore reprinted a notice from one James O. Boyle offering a reward of one thousand dollars for the head of “the notorious incendiary and infamous scoundrel, and violator of all laws, human divine, the British admiral COCKBURN—or, five hundred dollars for each of his ears, on delivery.”50 Whether Cockburn’s expedition up the Chesapeake had done anything to advance British strategic objectives was another matter, and despite Lord Melville’s injunction to Warren not to let the summer campaign inside the bay interfere with the higher priority of enforcing the blockade, it had already done just that. The whole Chesapeake enterprise, in fact, was becoming a huge distraction and diversion of force and attention for the British commander in chief. Cockburn rejoined the fleet on May 7, and a week later the whole British armada was back at Hampton Roads, whereupon Warren decided that his first order of business was to sail with a powerful convoy to Halifax to deliver the forty prizes Cockburn had taken. He returned on June 19 with an even larger naval force, the long-awaited soldiers and marines from Bermuda, and a new plan to get the Constellation. It was a measure of how large the Chesapeake and the frigate it contained were looming in Warren’s thinking that he had now amassed eight ships of the line, twelve frigates, eight smaller men-of-war, plus various other tenders and transports, some 70 percent of the entire British strength on the North American station, at Hampton Roads for the purpose. Commanding the ground troops was Colonel Sir Thomas Sidney Beckwith, an experienced army officer who had been sent earlier in the year to Canada to take on the post of assistant quartermaster general of British troops in North America.51

  On June 21 a force of twenty British ships moved to the mouth of the Nansemond River, just west of Norfolk. Craney Island, guarding the mouth of the harbor, had been reinforced with three naval cannons (two twenty-four-pounders and one eighteen-pounder) along with 150 sailors from the Constellation and about 400 militiamen, including the Portsmouth Artillery Company, armed with four six-pounders. Mid-morning on the twenty-second the Americans saw about 2,500 British marines and infantry landing on the beach of the mainland to the west of the island, which was separated by a narrow strip of water that could be forded at low tide. Then at eleven o’clock a flotilla of fifty barges began rowing toward the island from the seaward side in a second prong of the attack. At the lead was Admiral Warren’s beautifully turned out personal barge, known as the Centipede, painted a rich green, rowed with twenty-four oars; in her bow was a brass three-pounder gun and Captain John M. Hanchett, captain of the ship of the line Diadem, who had volunteered to lead the boat attack.

  On Craney a few Congreve rockets fell, fired from the British contingent on the mainland. The American artillery commander, an ex–merchant mariner named Arthur Emmerson, ordered his men to hold their fire until the boats were in range. “Now, boys, are you ready?” he called out. “Fire!” A hail of round shot, canister, and grape ripped diagonally into the Centipede, hulling the barge, carrying away both legs of a French mercenary soldier, and seriously wounding Hanchett in the thigh. Then the Centipede and four other barges grounded in the shoal water that stretched for half a mile in front of the island, never more than four feet deep even at high tide, but on the falling tide now considerably shallower. They stuck fast one hundred yards from the battery as the murderous fire continued to pour in. The officers of Constellation “fired their 18 pounder more like riflemen than Artillerists, I never saw such shooting and seriously believe they saved the Island yesterday,” reported Captain John Cassin, the commanding naval officer at Norfolk. A British seaman sounding with a boathook found three feet of slimy mud, and the order was given to retreat. The American defenders waded out to the stranded boats and took about sixty prisoners as the other boats rowed back on the ebbing tide to the British ships. Sitting miraculously unhurt on the bow gun of the Centipede was a small terrier, a mascot of the British troops.

  The British shore division had meanwhile abandoned their attempt as well; at least forty deserters seized their chance to come across to the American lines, but the rest were reembarking on the boats that had ferried them ashore.

  The only casualty on the American side was a Quaker pacifist who had been given the task of watching over a tent on the island crammed full of reserve powder, which accidentally blew up that night, momentarily spreading a false alarm in Norfolk that the British had renewed their attack.52

  Warren sent a completely dishonest report that wildly understated his casualties and the size of the fiasco, but in fact the whole operation had been a shambles. The boat assault needed high water to succeed and the land assault low water; the compromise of launching the attack on the ebbing tide simply made both impossible
. “A large creek stopped our progress by land, and shoal water stopped the boats by sea. A sharp cannonade from the works on the island cost us seventy-one men, without returning a shot! We lost some boats also, and re-embarked in the evening with about as much confusion as at landing,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Charles Napier, the commander of the 102nd Regiment, in his journal the next day. “Our attack on Craney Island was silly,” he went on to observe:

  Had Norfolk been decently attacked it would not have resisted ten minutes; had we landed a gun Craney was gone; had we attacked at high tide it was gone: still it was the wrong place to attack we should not have lost more men in striking at the town. But the faults of this expedition sprung from one simple cause—there were three commanders! It was a council of War, and what council of war ever achieved a great exploit?

  Had either Sir John Warren, Sir Sydney Beckwith, or Admiral Cockburn acted singly and without consultation, we should not have done such foolish things.

  Napier thought British overconfidence was to blame as well: “We despise the Yankee too much.”53

  Four days after the failed attempt against Craney Island, the British force struck at Hampton, a town of about a thousand residents on the opposite side of the roads whose only appeal as a target for an amphibious assault was its great vulnerability to naval invasion: it contained nothing of military value. With Cockburn and Beckwith directing the attack ashore, the British troops brushed aside a few hundred militia and as usual started looting the town. But this time the plunder took on a wilder tone. The church was pillaged and its silver plate carried off; the sails of windmills were torn to the ground; closets, trunks, and drawers were pulled open and plundered in private houses; and then the French chasseurs began brutalizing some of the townspeople, shooting and killing an elderly bedridden man, tormenting another old man by stripping him naked and stabbing him in the arms with their bayonets, and then carrying off and raping several women. One woman tried to run into a creek to escape and was dragged back to the house by her five or six assailants, among whom she said were soldiers “dressed in red and speaking correctly the English language,” suggesting there were British troops joining in with the green-clad chasseurs. Napier wrote afterward that his men of the 102nd “almost mutinied at my preventing them joining in the sack of that unfortunate town.” Only the marine artillery “behaved like soldiers,” he said. “They called out, Colonel … we blush for what we see, depend upon us not a man of the marine artillery will plunder.”54