Perilous Fight
Page 40
The bleakness of the physical setting simply stunned many of the Americans; they could not believe, they said, that such a spot existed in England; there was not a bush or tree, and even rabbits and birds seemed to find the moor too forsaken a place to live. The local people believed it was alive with demons and ghosts at night; none set forth from the nearby town of Princetown if it meant being caught on the moor after sundown. Valpey said he saw the sun three times in the first month he was there and not at all the next two months. The yellow woolen prison jackets and trousers the men were issued made the prisoners themselves the only colorful objects in a landscape of unremitting drabness.38
But many of the jailers were kind and apparently felt a kinship with the Americans, at least as compared with the thousands of Frenchmen they had had charge of for the previous eight years. One day Benjamin Browne was standing with a group of Americans who were poking some fun at the imperturbable turnkey of prison number 7 when a French prisoner, who had been taken in an American privateer, decided to join in the fun and, striking a comical pose, began razzing the jailer—“Jean Bull, Jean Bull, rote beef, rote beef, pomme de terre—God tam”—whereupon the Englishman calmly raised his fist and knocked the Frenchman down, to tumultuous cheers from the Americans. The jailer explained he “could take a joke from a Yankee, because they were cousins loik,” but was not going to put up with it from “a frog-eating Frenchman.”39
The Americans were left almost completely to themselves to organize the prison, maintain discipline, and fill their time as they chose. Most of the barracks elected committees, ran their own courts to punish offenders, and carried out merciless floggings on fellow prisoners caught stealing, skimming the fat off the mess’s soup for their own use (“the grand Vizier’s office at Constantinople is not more dangerous than a cook’s at this prison,” opined Waterhouse), or letting themselves become too filthy. Every day the local farmers and tradesmen were allowed to hold a market on the parade ground from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and vegetables, milk, meat, butter, tea, sugar, clothes, shoes, tobacco, soap, trinkets, and books were sold to supplement the prison-issued diet of beef, bread, barley, cabbage, onions, potatoes, and herring. In January 1814 the American government began supplying a small allowance to the prisoners through the American prisoners’ agent in London, initially one and a half pence a day, raised in April to two and a half pence, doled out in the form of two 1-pound notes a month to each six-man mess; and many of the men also spent their time making ship models with beef bones for the spars and hulls and twisted human hair for the rigging, weaving baskets, fashioning tinware and shoes, even building violins. Others set up shops to resell in small quantities consignments of tobacco and dry goods they purchased from the town’s grocers, or peddle ersatz coffee boiled up from burnt bread, or fried codfish and potato cakes known as plumgudgeon at a penny a piece, or a stew called freco whose predominant ingredient “by an almost infinite degree” was water, at two pennies a pint. George Little earned a shilling a day washing his fellow prisoners’ clothes, at sixpence per dozen.40 Adding to their surreal circumstances, many of the two thousand Americans thrown into British prisons after being released from impressment in the Royal Navy at the start of the war started receiving the pay and prize money they had been owed. In all, probably at least $10,000 a month was coming into the pockets of the Dartmoor prisoners and promptly placed into circulation in the flourishing prison economy.41
At times Dartmoor seemed more “a thriving village than a notorious and unhealthy prison,” as one historian put it. One American prisoner observed that “Dartmoor prison was a world in miniature, with all its jealousies, envying and strife.” There were informers and the type of corrosive doomsayers that afflict every prison and army barracks: “there is a set of busy-idlers among us,” Waterhouse complained, “a sort of newsmongers, fault-finders, and predictors, who are continually bothering us with unsubstantial rumors.”42 An elaborate effort to stage a mass escape by tunneling under the walls was foiled in the summer of 1814 by an informer, who received his release and a passport to the United States for his betrayal. For forty nights the prisoners had dug for hours in shifts, hiding the excavated dirt each morning by plastering it on the walls and covering it with whitewash or waiting for a heavy rain and dumping it in the water channels that ran through the yard; they had reached as far as the inner wall when one morning a thousand soldiers marched into the yard and the colonel strode right to the hidden entrance of the tunnel, thoroughly inspected the excavation, and delivered an apparently unironic tribute to the prisoners for their industry before ordering his men to fill it in. Little said his fellow prisoners vowed to kill the man if they ever caught up with him back home.43
There was also a gang of toughs who styled themselves “the Rough Allies” who bullied and intimidated anyone they could, knocking over rivals’ market stalls, running gaming tables and pawning operations, and denouncing as “Federalists” anyone who tried to stand in their way. But there was also a lending library of several hundred books in prison number 7, purchased by a prisoner with his discharge money from the British man-of-war he had served aboard as an impressed seaman; there was a regular school in prison number 1 offering classes at sixpence a week in mathematics, navigation, French, and Spanish; there was a music society and religious services.44
Nothing captured the contradictions of Dartmoor more than prison number 4, which housed the thousand or so black prisoners. They had been mixed in with the rest of the prisoners until spring 1814, when the white prisoners petitioned the commandant to have the blacks separated, claiming “it was impossible to prevent these fellows from stealing.”45 That may or may not have been so, but prison number 4 soon acquired a reputation as the most well-regulated of them all. Browne observed that “many of the most respectable prisoners preferred to mess in No. 4, on account of the superior order of that prison.” It was presided over by a six-foot-three black man known as “King Dick,” who strode through the barracks in a bearskin cap and summarily put down any challenges to his authority with a huge cudgel he always carried at his side. King Dick held a monopoly on the gambling and beer stalls in number 4, but also staged theatrical performances, having taken over the stock of costumes and scenery left by the departing French prisoners, charging the white prisoners sixpence to see Othello and Romeo and Juliet. A protégé of King Dick’s called Simon preached feverish sermons on Sundays and succeeded in converting two white prisoners to his brand of fervent Christianity; number 4 had several schools that were popular with the white prisoners as well. “In No 4 the Black’s Prison I have spent considerable of my time, for in the 3rd story or Cock loft they have reading whriting Fenceing, Boxing Dancing & many other schools which is very diverting to a young Person,” Nathaniel Pierce, a privateersman from Newburyport, wrote in his journal; “indeed there is more amusement in this Prisson than in all the rest of them.”46
There was no cure for the tedium and homesickness, though, and as the year 1814 dragged on with no release in sight, the sameness of each day after day became the prominent feature in prisoners’ journals: “have done nothing this day but set down in my birth and walk about the Prisson … more unpleasant weather … wet and disagreeable weather … made a tour through all the prisons … kept My house and Received Company as it came both good and bad … had no imployment to Day … This day comes in with heavy rains and blowing weather nothing worthy of remark has transpired … This day comes in with more Dartmoor weather … Evening I past in reading—Time goes Tegeous …” Boredom drove two prisoners to wager a pot of porter on the outcome of a louse race, but one had to forfeit when the entrant he had been carefully keeping in the collar of his shirt vanished the day of the race.47 Joseph Valpey filled a notebook with poems and similarly tried to make light of their verminous conditions:
In Yallow dress from head to foot
Just like a swarm of Bee’s
From Morn to Night you’ll see a sight
of Hunting lice and flea�
��s.
But most of his poems were becoming maudlin laments, of fortitude gone, hopes extinguished, loves forgotten;
My country I fear has forgot me
And I doubt if I see you again48
It would have taken a paragon of administrative efficiency, psychological subtlety, and keen leadership to have successfully commanded a prison of six thousand increasingly restless American prisoners, but the commandant of Dartmoor, like all the British prison commanders, was a broken-down and over-the-hill officer given the job because the Admiralty did not know what else to do with him. The following year Captain Thomas G. Shortland would become one of the most hated men of the war when the situation at Dartmoor spiraled out of control, hundreds died of disease, and then—months after the war’s end—guards opened fire on prisoners in an incident that confirmed all the worst American beliefs about British tyranny and cruelty. But Shortland was probably less evil than inept, more overwhelmed with a responsibility he did not begin to know how to discharge than deliberately malicious; and at the start, at least, he seemed to be making an effort at being accommodating. He told an acquaintance that he never “read or heard of such a set of Devil-daring, God-provoking fellows, as these same Yankees; I had rather have the charge of five thousand Frenchmen than five hundred of these sons of liberty; and yet, I love the dogs better than I do the damn’d frog-eaters.”49
For most of 1814 the brunt of the prisoners’ resentments fell upon the American agent for prisoners in London, Reuben Beasley, another overwhelmed man. Beasley almost never replied to the many petitions and entreaties the prisoners sent him. He visited American prisoners only twice, both times seeming to recoil in physical horror not only at the conditions the men were being held in but from the men themselves; and his cold and aloof exterior only reinforced the growing belief among those thousands of men so far from home for so long that they had become expendable pawns in a war without end.50
CHAPTER 10
Fortunes of War
FOR 1814 William Jones foresaw “a bloody and devastating summer and autumn.”
On December 30, 1813, a British schooner under a flag of truce had sailed into Annapolis, bearing an offer from London of direct negotiations, and throughout the spring rumors of impending peace again began to swirl. But Jones was gloomy over the reports coming back from the peace commissioners. The British absolutely refused to budge on the matter of impressment, and with Napoleon’s defeat and abdication on April 11, 1814, a triumphant Britain would be even less inclined to make any offers of conciliation. The American army’s land campaign had gone nowhere since its victory at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813; in March 1814 Wilkinson was relieved of his command after one final attempt to advance into Quebec ended in disaster yet again, and the prospects of any decisive American triumph against British Canada seemed to have vanished for good.
“Britain will have changed her character if under the dominating and intoxicating circumstances of her fortune she should display any thing like a rational disposition,” Jones wrote Madison. “My mind is made up for the worst and my consolation is that whatever disasters we may sustain, the vindictive desperation of the enemy will unite and purify the country and I trust enable us to sustain the conflict and preserve our institutions undefiled.”1
Jones had continued his double duty as navy and Treasury secretary but wrote a friend that the burden had become “intolerable.” He called himself “as perfect a galley slave as ever laboured at the oar.” Congress was also growing impatient with the extraordinary indulgence Madison seemed to be granting Gallatin in holding his place open indefinitely. In February 1814 Madison finally nominated a permanent replacement as Treasury secretary, but no one of knowledge and ability had been willing to touch the job, and even Jones would privately admit that the man who did accept it, Senator George Washington Campbell of Tennessee, was “entirely out of place in the Treasury.”2
Signals and instructions for ships under convoy (The National Archives, U.K.)
Federalist congressman Samuel Taggart of Massachusetts sarcastically suggested that the new secretary’s initials stood for “Government Wants Cash!” Jones, in one of his final tasks as acting secretary, had given Congress an estimate of expenses and revenues for the coming year, and the numbers were staggering. The cost of the war, he projected, was going to rise 50 percent over what it had been for 1813, $24.5 million for the army and $7 million for the navy. Only two-thirds of the $6 million in taxes so reluctantly approved the previous summer were likely to be collected, leaving a shortfall of $29.35 million to be raised through loans. On top of that, Madison, frustrated over the continuing failure to halt the illegal trade with the enemy and still convinced that withholding American goods could strike a lethal blow to British power, had requested and received approval from Congress for the most draconian embargo yet: no ships were allowed to leave American ports carrying any cargoes, and even fishermen had to put up large bonds before being allowed to put to sea. The loss of customs duties cut even deeper into the small stream of government income.
New England bankers, overwhelmingly Federalists, refused to subscribe to the new Treasury loans unless the administration agreed to drop impressment as an issue in the peace negotiations, and they put pressure on major banks in New York to follow suit. When the Treasury offered a $10 million loan in April, half was finally taken by a single New York financier, Jacob Barker, but he defaulted on a third of his commitment. Eventually the Treasury was offering a discount rate of 20 percent and still could not fill more than half the new loans it tried to offer. With the government floating new loans just to pay the interest on old ones, the United States was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.3
So was William Jones himself. He wrote a long letter to Madison in April, laying bare his dire financial straits and begging to be permitted to return to private life so he could begin paying off his debts and redeem his personal honor. He had never sought public office; he did not regret the pecuniary sacrifice it had entailed; but “circumstances over which I have no control” now required him to leave office as soon as the next meeting of Congress was concluded, he told Madison.
I trust you will believe me when I declare that nothing but the purest attachment to the independence honor and welfare of our happy country and its inestimable institutions, for the maintenance of which we are engaged in a war more just and inevitable than even that of our glorious revolution, could have prevailed upon me to accept the appointment with which you have honored me.
Every motive of private interest convenience prudence and settled social habits urged me to remain in private life; but the same indignant feelings which impelled me, not to the “tented field,” but to the frozen untented heights of Princeton, Pluckamen, and Morristown, when but just turned of fifteen prompted the acceptance of my present situation, with the hope of doing some good until an honorable peace should again bless our land; beyond which I never contemplated to remain in office.
Apologizing for the “egotism” of his letter, he continued:
I am poor, Sir—nay more I am embarrassed by the result of my mercantile affairs, which the untoward events of the last five years have reversed from a state of approximate independence to an inability to meet my obligations.
His voyage to India in 1808 had left him with a debt that he now had given up hopes of clearing. Due to the embargoes and America’s other self-imposed trade restrictions, he had had to sell his ship for half the $47,000 it had cost him; $90,000 worth of indigo cloth he had brought back from Calcutta had sat in a warehouse at considerable expense for three years, then shipped to Archangel, then eight hundred miles by land to St. Petersburg, then finally to Vienna seeking a market. He had just now learned that a few months ago his agent had disposed of it at a considerable loss. Jones’s debts totaled more than $14,000, which even his generous salary of $4,500 a year as navy secretary was not going to begin to pay off. It was time for him to go, as soon as Madison would release him from his duties.
4
ON JUNE 3, 1814, Madison summoned his cabinet to a meeting for the seventh to decide, in effect, the future of the entire war.
Besides whatever “dominating and intoxicating” effects victory over Napoleon had brought Britain, it had also thrown open the whole continent of Europe to British trade. That had undermined whatever coercive power the American economic embargo had left, and on March 31, Madison had taken even his own party by surprise when he announced that the restrictive system that had been his article of faith for a decade and a half of public office was a dead letter, and asked Congress for immediate repeal of the three-month-old embargo. Large majorities in both houses swiftly agreed. Jones had argued several weeks earlier that repealing the embargo was the only way to restore some confidence in the government’s soundness in the financial community, but Madison’s reversal on so key a matter of principle was a harbinger that another one of those long-thought-out Madisonian conclusions, brewing since the news first began to arrive of the victories of Britain and her allies against Napoleon the previous fall, was coming to a head. Simply, the war was no longer winnable on the terms that Madison had launched it, and the challenge now was not to win but to find an honorable, or even a face-saving, way out.5
William Jones’s strategic thoughts had been running on a parallel course for some time. A few weeks before the June 7 meeting he laid out for Madison a strong case for going over to the purely defensive on land, essentially conceding that the conquest of Canada was impossible. While assuring the president that he would not see “the slightest relaxation” in the navy’s attention to the lakes—everything that “could or can be done has and shall be done”—Jones pointed out that offensive military operations could not seriously be contemplated, given the enemy’s secure positions at Kingston and on the Niagara peninsula. The stalemate on the ground meant that the war on the Canadian frontier was now “exclusively a naval contest” for control of the lakes, and the danger was that America was being drawn into a naval war of attrition it could never win.6 The American navy was approaching a force of 10,000 officers and men, with more than 3,000 of them on the lakes. If the buildup on Lake Ontario continued as planned, the number of men required for service on the lakes would have to more than double, to 7,000, within the next year. Even with a 25 percent pay bonus for lake duty voted in April it was proving difficult to find enough men, and then the increasingly generous bounties Congress kept voting to try to fill the chronically undermanned army had cut deeply into navy recruiting across the board. The army was now offering a bonus of $124 plus 320 acres of land to any man who agreed to enlist for the duration of the war; the most the navy could offer was a $48 bonus, and Jones reported that the frigate Congress, ready for sea at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “has been waiting a long time only for 100 men and cannot get them.”7