At first Beckwith made no mention of the atrocities in his official reports. But when the Virginia militia commander, Brigadier General Robert Barraud Taylor, sent a formal protest, the British commander claimed that the “excesses of which you complain at Hampton” were a direct reprisal for atrocities committed on Craney Island by American troops who shot British troops in the barges after they had surrendered. But Beckwith privately admitted to Taylor’s aide-de-camp Captain John Myers, who had been rowed out to the San Domingo under a flag of truce to present the American note, that the French troops were to blame and he had ordered them reembarked on their ships. “Appealing to my knowledge of the nature of the war in Spain, in which these men had been trained,” Myers reported, “he told me they could not be restrained.”
A few days later, Beckwith admitted in a memorandum to Warren that the “Two Independent Companies of Foreigners” had been “so perfectly insubordinate” even before arriving from Bermuda that it had been necessary to hold repeated courts-martial, one man actually being shot for mutiny, and that “their brutal Treatment of several Peaceful Inhabitants” of Hampton was the final straw. The men were shipped off to Halifax, where they continued to run wild, now with British civilians as their target. “The Inhabitants of Halifax are in the greatest alarm about these fellows,” a British official reported a few weeks later.55
A subsequent American investigation rejected Beckwith’s accusation of cruelty during the battle at Craney Island, which would hardly have been much of a justification for rape and pillage against noncombatants even if true; it concluded that one British soldier was shot when he attempted to escape after starting to wade to shore and surrender.
The atrocities at Hampton and the British officers’ refusal to take responsibility for the actions of soldiers under their command seemed an ominous signal of a new and far less honorable phase of warfare. “Remember Hampton!” became an inevitable slogan for American supporters of the war. Lieutenant Colonel Napier was privately appalled at the British attempts to brush the matter under the rug. “Every horror was committed with impunity, rape, murder, pillage, and not a man was punished!” he wrote in his journal. General Taylor, in his protest note to Admiral Warren, had directly raised the question of whether respect for the laws of honor and chivalry was still to be expected: “We are, in this part of the country, merely in the noviciate of our warfare,” Taylor wrote. “It will depend on you whether the evils inseparable from a state of war shall, in our operations, be tempered by the mildness of civilized life, or, under your authority, be aggravated by all the fiend-like passions which can be instilled in them.”56
There were other signs by the summer of 1813 that the war had entered a new and much less genteel chapter. Beyond the inevitable brutalization that occurs in all wars in which easy victory proves elusive, the American–British conflict was shot through with the kinds of personal and emotional enmities that threatened to make the fighting especially ugly as each side retaliated in a chain of escalating violence. The British alliance with the Indians particularly inflamed American feelings, especially after several incidents in which Indian warriors massacred American militiamen after they surrendered to British-led forces. But the northwestern frontiersmen who flocked to the ranks of the United States land forces were no less barbarous in their accustomed treatment of Indians, often murdering, scalping, and mutilating any who fell into their hands. And while a few British officers respected and even liked Americans, others had personal scores left over from the Revolutionary War they still hoped to settle, and probably most regarded their foe as their distinct inferior in both martial prowess and personal honor—which in itself came to be a justification in the British mind for refusing to accord Americans the chivalric treatment due an equal.
British naval officers were especially outraged by a series of unconventional attacks launched against their ships by American civilians employing booby traps, floating mines, even submarines in June and July 1813. In March 1813 Congress had passed the “Torpedo Act,” which authorized a bounty of one half the value of any British warship destroyed; inspired by that incentive, a number of inventors and daredevils began hatching schemes. On June 5, 1813, the boats of the seventy-four Victorious picked up a “powder machine,” consisting of a keg packed with gunpowder and a trigger designed to set it off on impact, floating toward their ship in the Chesapeake. Cockburn informed Warren of the development in a message sprinkled with sarcastic comments about official American publications “constantly harping” on the government’s dedication to “Humanity” even as it was devising such “humane Experiments … to dispose of us by wholesale Six Hundred at a time, without further trouble or risk.”57
Several attempts against the British ship of the line Plantagenet, guarding the mouth of the Chesapeake near Cape Henry, followed over the next weeks. On July 18 a Chesapeake mariner named Elijah Mix rowed an open boat he dubbed Chesapeake’s Revenge to within eighty yards of his target under cover of night but rapidly withdrew when hailed by the ship before he could launch the homemade torpedo he was carrying. He tried again two nights later with the same result, this time getting within twelve yards and drawing musket and rocket fire and then an illuminating flare, followed by the ship opening up with its guns, slipping its cables, and filling its sails in flight. Mix again got away and returned once more on the night of the twenty-fourth. This time he succeeded in setting his torpedo drifting toward its target and was within a whisker of succeeding when it detonated just yards too soon, throwing a column of water forty feet in the air and cascading over the ship’s deck but causing little damage.58
In New York some local civilians hatched even more audacious schemes to eliminate the line-of-battle ship Ramillies in Long Island Sound, and with her the blockade of the American frigates at New London. Outfitting a coasting schooner filled with naval stores as a tempting bait, they proceeded off of New London on June 25. British barges pursued, and the schooner’s crew put up a show of firing some small arms in resistance, then fled to shore in a small boat. Below deck was a huge quantity of gunpowder and combustibles, set to go up when a hogshead of dried peas was shifted, which would pull a lanyard tied to a gunlock and fire a powder train. The captured vessel was anchored and a tender from the Ramillies sent alongside; the seventy-four herself was, however, a safe distance away when the booby trap exploded. A lieutenant and ten men from the Ramillies were killed and three seamen were wounded, “much scorched in the Face, Arms, & Legs,” Captain Sir Thomas Hardy reported. Warren expressed fury and indignation, issuing a general order that as “it appears the Enemy are disposed to make use of every unfair and Cowardly mode of Warfare,” no prize or boat was to be permitted alongside any of His Majesty’s ships before a thorough examination had taken place. Hardy now kept his ship in almost constant motion, swept the underside every two hours to check for attached mines, and shifted his position away from the mouth of New London’s harbor and closer to Long Island.59
The growing unconventional warfare in American waters led directly to a hardening of attitudes toward prisoners when Hardy learned in August of another plot to blow up his ship and sent a landing party to East Hampton to foil it. Joshua Penny, the civilian who was leading the attempt, was pulled out of his bed and carried aboard the Ramillies, where he was clapped in irons. When town officials protested, Hardy replied that Penny would be treated as a prisoner of war, if not a spy. President Madison personally ordered that a British prisoner of equal stature be put “in the same state, of degradation & suffering” in retaliation.60
A series of retaliatory actions over the treatment of prisoners, triggered chiefly by Britain’s moves to bring to trial as traitors a number of American prisoners it claimed were British subjects, had already undermined the lenient rules the two nations had agreed to follow for exchanges. The men from the Guerriere whom Rodgers had pulled off the cartel in Boston harbor and held as hostages were released in June 1813 after word arrived that the British had dropped their pl
ans to try the detained members of the Nautilus’s crew for treason, but tit-for-tat retaliations involving other prisoners immediately reinflamed the situation. In retaliation for the Americans’ designation of several British seamen as hostages “to answer for the safety and proper treatment” of other Americans sent to England for trial, the British authorities in Halifax threw sixteen American seamen, including ten crewmen of the Chesapeake, into three dungeons each measuring nine by seven feet. In response, Madison ordered sixteen British seamen confined in similar conditions and also had another one hundred British prisoners held in close confinement as hostages for a like number of still more Americans just sent to Britain for trial. Twenty-three mostly Irish-born American citizens serving in the U.S. army were also in England facing charges of treason, and the American government designated twenty-three British officers as hostages to be “immediately put to death” if the Americans were; the British responded by designating forty-six American officers as hostages for them; the Americans ordered forty-six more British officers held as hostages; and by the end of 1813 all officers on both sides were being held in close confinement and under threat of death. Sir George Prevost, the governor general of Canada, vowed “to prosecute the war with unmitigated severity” if any of the British hostages were harmed.61
Meanwhile, local British commanders were starting to refuse to release any more prisoners on parole for future exchange. Cockburn issued orders that American prisoners taken in numbers beyond those that could be immediately exchanged for British prisoners would be sent straight to prisons in Bermuda. By the summer of 1813 the British were holding six times as many prisoners as the Americans were, and in August the British government stopped all releases of Americans from prison depots in England until the accounts were brought into balance. In England were 2,200 American seamen who had been impressed in the Royal Navy and who refused to fight when the war broke out and then were summarily held as prisoners of war; there were also a number of merchant sailors who had been trapped in Britain when the war began whom the British refused to exchange; the British also refused to release any crews captured from privateers that mounted fewer than fourteen guns.
After a year of escalating tensions, all the Americans brought to England as supposed British subjects charged with raising arms against their king were returned to the general prison population and none were brought to trial, and by April 1814 Secretary of State Monroe reported that most of the hostages on both sides had been removed from close confinement and the threats of retaliatory execution dropped. But the threats and counterthreats had left each side convinced that the other was prepared to abandon the laws of civilized war and humanity. And the collapse of the parole system made the consequences of being taken prisoner far greater than they had been for the combatants on both sides.62
On September 6, 1813, the British armada pulled out of Chesapeake Bay, Warren heading for Halifax with more prizes and several warships desperately in need of refit, Cockburn for Bermuda with other ships needing long-term repairs, and leaving behind the line-of-battle ship Dragon, two frigates, two brigs, and three schooners at Lynnhaven Bay for the winter. The coming of the autumn “fever season” was one consideration in Warren’s decision to end the campaign, but so was the toll taken by constant desertions and the relatively poor return he had gained for all his troubles. Lieutenant Colonel Napier was dismayed by the ineptness of the campaign. “We have done nothing but commit blunders,” he wrote in his journal. “Nothing was done with method, all was hurry, confusion, and long orders.” Cockburn, he thought, “is no doubt an active good seaman, but has no idea of military arrangements; and he is so impetuous that he won’t give time for others to do for him what he cannot or will not do himself.… Cockburn trusts all to luck, and makes no provision for failure: this may do with sailors, but not on shore, where hard fighting avails nothing if not directed by mind, and most accurate calculation.
“I have learned much on this expedition,” Napier mused; “how to embark and disembark large bodies in face of an enemy; how useless it is to have more than one commander; how necessary it is that the commanders by sea and land should agree and have one view: finally never to trust Admiral Cockburn.”63
“GREAT GOD when will the tide turn on Land,” lamented the Philadelphia merchant Chandler Price to his old acquaintance William Jones. In the campaign against Canada, America’s own blunders had continued at a steady pace through the spring and summer of 1813. On the Detroit frontier William Henry Harrison’s army was thrown on the defensive, holed up in two forts on the southwest corner of Lake Erie. The Americans bravely held out against a series of British attacks—a 1,200-man relief force from Kentucky that arrived on May 5 suffered 50 percent casualties when it sallied out against some of the British and Indian troops besieging Fort Meigs—but Harrison’s plans to take the offensive and recapture Detroit were completely stymied. On the Niagara front an American force of 1,700 raided York—present-day Toronto, the capital of Upper Canada—in late April but accomplished little. The Americans suffered 320 casualties, most when the retreating British set off the garrison’s powder magazine, and among the fatally injured was General Zebulon Pike, one of the comparatively few capable officers the American army had in the field. Angered by the explosion, the American troops looted the town, burned public buildings, smashed a government printing press, and stole the books out of a subscription library before withdrawing, which did more to arouse British and Canadian anger than accomplish anything of military significance.
A month later an offensive by 4,500 American troops under Major General Winfield Scott pressed west into Canada from the Niagara River. Things began encouragingly enough with the capture of Fort George on the Canadian side of the river where it joined Lake Ontario, but within two weeks the campaign had turned into another American rout. Twice, outnumbered British units ambushed large American detachments that had pushed west trying to follow up the initial victories; the British captured two American generals and the collapse of the offensive forced General Dearborn to order the evacuation of all positions inside Canadian territory except for Fort George. When the news reached Washington in July, Republican war supporters forced Madison at last to relieve Dearborn of his command. “We have deposed Gen. Dearborn,” said Pennsylvania Republican congressman Charles J. Ingersoll, “who is to be removed to Albany, where he may eat sturgeon and recruit.”64
In the east, a disorganized plan to march on Montreal began late in the summer and almost immediately fell apart under the disastrous command of Major General James Wilkinson, whom one historian has called the worst general on either side in the war, and probably the worst general in all of American history. Winfield Scott thought Wilkinson an “unprincipled imbecile,” and Major General Wade Hampton, who was supposed to cooperate in the invasion with a force of 4,500 men under his command, simply refused to obey Wilkinson’s orders. During the campaign Wilkinson’s officers observed with increasing alarm the general’s attempts to treat his dysentery with massive doses of laudanum, which left him “very merry,” singing and garrulously repeating stories but hardly inspiring confidence.65
The failure of the opening land campaigns had brought into sharp relief the crucial importance of controlling the lakes—Erie on the Detroit front, Ontario on the Niagara front, and Champlain on the eastern front—to secure the movement of men and supplies. Roads were extremely poor and exposed to attack, and initial British naval superiority on the lakes had given their forces a freedom of movement that had allowed them to take the offensive in what was increasingly becoming a slow positional war of maneuver, not the quick dash that Americans had confidently predicted. Securing American territory against further British advances, much less carrying out the still-hoped-for invasion of Canada, now hung on achieving control of the lakes. Right after assuming office, William Jones had assured Commodore Isaac Chauncey, who had assumed command of naval forces on Lakes Erie and Ontario in September 1812, that he recognized what was at stake: “It
is impossible to attach too much importance to our naval operations on the Lakes—the success of the ensuing campaign will depend absolutely on our superiority on all the lakes—& every effort, & resource, must be directed to that object.” Crash shipbuilding programs were begun on Lake Ontario at Sackets Harbor, New York, and on Lake Erie at Presque Isle (now Erie), Pennsylvania; 150 men from the Constitution’s crew and other men from blockaded or refitting warships were sent west; iron, cordage, and shot were hauled overland from Pittsburgh. Noah Brown, a master shipwright, took charge in March 1813 at Presque Isle, where two 20-gun brigs were under construction. That same month Captain Sir James-Lucas Yeo of the Royal Navy arrived in Canada to take charge of the British squadrons.66
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