Croker’s petulant responses were reprinted everywhere, accompanied with derisive comments. The Naval Chronicle’s correspondent “Albion” observed that the Admiralty was the party who should be “brought to account,” for “leaving the coast of Ireland and the English Channel blockaded by half a dozen Yankee cruisers!” But then, he added, the entire history of the “ill fated” American war could be traced through the trail of “glaring errors of our naval administration.”
The incensed merchants then appealed directly to the prince regent, noting in their petition to His Royal Highness the “coldness and neglect” with which their earlier appeals had been received by the proper departments of government.52
The nuisance value of a warship engaged in raiding enemy commerce was in principle many times that of a privateer; a defensive patrol or convoy escort sufficient to chase off an opportunistic privateer was one thing, a force that might have a warship-to-warship engagement on its hands another. But several of the especially intrepid American privateers began taking on the enemy’s men-of-war with a show of fight that sent more shock waves through the British naval establishment in late summer and early fall of 1814, when the Royal Navy suffered two of its bloodiest defeats of the war, both at the hands of privateers. On the night of September 26, in Fayal harbor in the Azores, the privateer brig General Armstrong from New York—a very different vessel from the one of the same name whose crew had mutinied off North Carolina in 1813—was attacked by four heavily armed and manned boats from ships of a British squadron that had arrived that afternoon. It was a gross violation of the port’s neutrality, and the British commander later tried to claim he was merely innocently going to “inquire” what ship she was. The American captain, Samuel Reid, repeatedly warned the boats off, and they were close enough to be touching the General Armstrong with a boat hook when the privateer opened fire, killing and wounding several of the British.
Reid then warped his ship under the protection of the fort. At about midnight the British renewed the attack, this time in twelve boats carrying hundreds of men. At one point the British seamen succeeded in boarding over the bow and starboard quarter and were beaten back with swords, pikes, pistols, and musket fire. The British even by their own account suffered more than a hundred killed and wounded; the American accounts put British losses at more than one hundred dead and more than 250 total casualties. The next day, realizing he could not hold out against the enemy determination to destroy his ship—the British captain said he would get the American privateer if he had to destroy the entire town of Fayal to do so—Reid had his men cut the masts down to stumps and blow a hole in the ship’s bottom. Gathering their small arms and clothes, the crew went ashore, leaving the General Armstrong to her fate. When the British captain demanded that the local authorities turn over the Americans as his prisoners, the Portuguese governor demurred and the Americans vowed to fight to the last man rather than be taken, which ended the matter. A week later the whole American crew left for Amelia Island aboard a Portuguese merchant brig.53
On October 11, 1814, the hardest-fought naval engagement of the entire war took place off Nantucket between the privateer Prince de Neufchatel and five barges from the British frigate Endymion in an almost exact replay of the General Armstrong’s defiant holdout. When British boarders succeeded in gaining the forecastle of the privateer, her captain swept them overboard with a hail of canister shot and bags of musket balls fired across the deck from one of her main guns. Again the British regulars suffered a loss of a hundred or more—to the American privateer’s nine killed and nineteen wounded.54
Neither the blockade nor the raids against American coastal cities, including even the capital, had succeeded in knocking America out of the fight. Just as in the Revolution, the British army never would commit sufficient force to occupy and hold territory, and it was most likely an impossible task in any case. Wellington himself had warned the government, when asked his opinion, that the vast and “thinly peopled” continent of America was simply ill suited to an extended military campaign that could tip the strategic balance decisively. “I do not know where you could carry on such an operation which would be so injurious to the Americans as to force them to sue for peace,” he advised.55
The last real possibility of proving Wellington wrong evaporated in September when Governor General Prevost marched from Canada into New York with an army of ten thousand men, heading down the west side of Lake Champlain. Prevost’s advance was a dramatic departure from the string of sharply fought but strategically indecisive clashes along the Canadian frontier all through the bloody summer of 1814, a bid for the decisive breakthrough on land that had eluded both sides for two years. In a two-and-a-half-hour naval battle in Plattsburgh Bay the morning of September 11, 1814, a British squadron of four ships and twelve gunboats sent to support Prevost was soundly defeated by an American force under the command of Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough. At a decisive moment in the battle, with the entire starboard battery of his flagship Saratoga knocked out, Macdonough warped the ship around 180 degrees using a series of anchors and cable springs he had carefully prepared ahead of time to bring the fresh battery to bear. During the battle Macdonough was twice knocked to the deck, once by a falling boom and once when the head of a decapitated midshipman smashed into his face. The British flagship Confiance took 105 shot holes in her hull. The casualties were horrific, with one in four men on each side killed or wounded. Prevost ordered a retreat, and Macdonough instantly became the most famous commander of the war at the time (if not so well remembered today): he was promoted by Congress to captain and showered with rewards of land and gold medals and swords and silver services from New York, Vermont, and other states. “In one month,” Macdonough recounted, “from a poor lieutenant I became a rich man.” He also ended the last serious threat of invasion from the north.56
The failure of the blockade had equally laid bare the impotence of Britain’s might. Not long after taking command in April 1814, Cochrane had extended the blockade to include all of New England, and on paper the entire American coast from Maine to New Orleans was now within the British noose. But, like Warren before him, he was constantly importuning the Admiralty for more ships to make it effective. Although the West Indies stations had been removed from his command, those stations’ ships had never been really available for service on the American coast anyway, and Cochrane calculated he needed more than twice as many frigates, sloops, and smaller vessels as were left him by his predecessor. In fact, the Royal Navy never deployed a force even close to what it would have taken to make the blockade complete. Cochrane concluded that ninety-eight ships were needed to maintain the blockade and that one-fourth to one-third of his force would be out of service at any given time in port refitting. With all the other demands on him to protect convoys, carry dispatches, transport troops, and support land operations, he actually never had more than twenty-five ships available for blockading. It probably would have taken the commitment of a force approaching half the entire strength of the Royal Navy to effectively seal off the American coast.57
The officers enforcing the blockade knew it, and it never was a completely serious endeavor for them. Lieutenant Henry Napier, aboard the frigate Nymphe on blockade duty in Massachusetts Bay in 1814, filled his journal with observations about the pretty girls on the coasting vessels they stopped, the many prizes they ransomed for a thousand or two thousand dollars rather than capturing or burning them, their irritation when British privateers tried to join the effort (“Shannon, privateer, again out. Must drive her off, as she spoils our cruising ground”), and the lobsters, clams, oysters, lambs, potatoes, green peas, newspapers, and every other comfort routinely supplied the British squadron by the local citizens they were supposedly at war with. The accommodations that blockader and blockaded alike were making after two years’ fighting reinforced the sense that the war had long ceased to be about one side or the other winning; it was something to be endured and in the meanwhile made the be
st of. Unlike the top British commanders on the American station, who had all along overestimated the significance of Federalist opposition to the war and who readily leapt to the conclusion that local collaboration was a sign of impending political upheaval that would knock America out of the fight, Napier thought most of the local “rascals” who eagerly filled the British squadron’s orders for supplies were opportunists, not allies; they only “like the English as a spendthrift loves an old rich wife; the sooner we are gone the better.”
Most of all was the boredom: endlessly plowing furrow after furrow through a field of blue-green waves, enduring nights of “hard rain, fog and anxiety,” writing diary entries oddly echoing those of the prisoners of Dartmoor, as day followed day. “Oh happy Home! when shall I enjoy ye again?” wrote surgeon’s mate William Begg of the frigate Tenedos off Boston, as he battled “the tedious hours” and “the ennui of a long inactive cruise.”58
In Ghent, where the American and British peace commissioners had at last agreed to meet, the weeks wore heavily too. The negotiations began on August 8, and two full months went by with virtually no progress. John Quincy Adams, who headed the American delegation, found the notes presented by the British “arrogant, overbearing, and offensive.” The British envoys were insisting on a series of “nonnegotiable” demands, including American demilitarization of the Great Lakes, cession of territory in northern Maine and the headlands of the Mississippi River, and creation of a huge reservation of land for the exclusive settlement of Britain’s Indian allies, encompassing 250,000 square miles including a third of Ohio and all of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and necessitating the expulsion of 100,000 American settlers. But Adams also suspected the British were simply stalling; every American proposal was referred back to London.
In October, convinced that things were going nowhere, Madison took the risky step of publishing the American envoys’ proposals, revealing publicly for the first time the stunning news that America had offered to drop the issue of impressment. The British opposition was emboldened enough by the news to attack the government for waging a “war of aggression and conquest.”
But the American negotiators remained gloomy, convinced the British were trying to drag out the talks as long as possible in the hope of meanwhile striking a coup on the battlefield that would tilt the political calculus decisively in their favor.59
· · ·
UNLIKE HER predecessor the Independence, the seventy-four-gun ship of the line Washington faultlessly glided into the water at her launching at the Portsmouth Navy Yard on October 1, 1814. But there were no guns to arm her, no men to man her, and no money to make up the lack of either. The navy had been scrambling to find guns and men for the lakes; the only foundries large enough to cast the big guns for the Washington were south of New York, and then they would have to be hauled overland to evade the blockade.
In Boston men were deserting from Bainbridge’s command in droves, and Bainbridge was picking feuds with everyone. He wrote to Secretary Jones bitterly complaining that he could not have his marine guards flogged—under the navy’s regulations, marines were subject to army discipline when ashore, and Congress had outlawed flogging in the army in May 1812—which prompted Jones to gently admonish Bainbridge, “The best examples of discipline in the universe are to be found where corporal punishment is unknown. It may brutalize, but cannot reform.” Bainbridge sent a sarcastic reply to the secretary stating that in that case he presumed he would not be held responsible for the public property under his charge, as he was forbidden to punish guards found sleeping on duty.60
Using the pretext of his seniority in the service, Bainbridge tried to override Hull’s command authority and ordered Captain Charles Morris to send him thirty of his men from Portsmouth, where they had arrived after the sloop of war Adams ran aground off the coast of Maine. Hull had to appeal to Jones to get the men back, and then another even more insolent note from Bainbridge arrived in Washington, informing the navy secretary, “I have received your order of the 26th ulto. and in obedience thereto, however injurious it may prove to the service, I instantly comply with it.”61
But there was no denying the exasperating circumstances. There was no money, for new recruits or even to pay for “the most urgent contingent purposes,” Jones reported to Madison on October 15. “If the salvation of a city depended upon the prompt transportation of a body of our seamen I have not a dollar.” Bainbridge said that even his officers were “really suffering,” with “no money, clothes, or credit and are embarrassed with debts.” Following the attack on Washington, most banks south of New England suspended specie payments, and the entire financial system of the country was on the verge of collapse. Treasury notes were all the government could offer as payment, and in Boston they were circulating at 20 percent discount; the notes of banks that had suspended specie payments were worth nothing at all outside the states where they were issued, effectively freezing the $50 million in bank credits the federal government held in the south and west.
“Something must be done and done speedily,” William Jones wrote the Treasury secretary, “or we shall have an opportunity of trying the experiment of maintaining an army and navy and carrying on a vigorous war without money.” But it was already too late. On November 9 the Treasury suspended interest payments on government debt, effectively declaring itself insolvent. Jones had managed to find some time to write a long proposal to the president on how the $60 million needed to keep the war going another year might be raised through a combination of new loans, a national bank that would lend the government $20 million at 6 percent interest for 12 years, more Treasury note issues, and $16 million in new internal taxes. The only trouble was that borrowing money or raising taxes did no good if it only brought in the same worthless paper the government was issuing in the first place.62
In New England defeatism was becoming the predominant sentiment everywhere. EVENTS OF THE USELESS WAR! ran a typical headline in the Boston Columbian Centinel. Bainbridge was apoplectic when a committee of Boston merchants appointed by Federalist governor Caleb Strong demanded that the Independence and the Constitution be moved outside the harbor so as not to invite a British attack on their city, and he adamantly refused to entertain their request to sink blockships at the harbor entrances. Jones solidly backed Bainbridge’s decision, pointing out that there was no reason to do the Royal Navy’s work for them in sealing off the harbor, thereby “relieving the enemy of the sluggish duty of blockade, to pursue a more active hostility.” A large group of Irish citizens of the town, joined by Harvard undergraduates, then banded together to help erect earthworks on Noddles Island in Boston harbor that Bainbridge recommended to stiffen the more active defenses of the port.63
But other northeasterners flirted openly with treason. Intelligence reports from Americans in Boston and along Long Island Sound flowed into the British squadrons; Decatur’s accusation about “blue lights” signaling the enemy at New London may have been ludicrous, but the willingness of more than a few disaffected northern men to spy for the enemy—even if what they provided was little more than what American newspapers reported—was real enough.64 Many of New England’s Congregational clergy were meanwhile denouncing the war more than ever, and by 1814 were willing to suggest that America had set herself against God himself. If a war was unjust, said one minister, “it will be the duty of the Christian patriot, however contrary to the native impulse of his feelings, to pray for the success of our declared enemies!”65
Governor Strong went so far as to send an agent to Halifax to explore a separate peace. And beginning in October the legislatures of the New England states voted to call a convention to demand changes to the Constitution aimed at curing the ills the Federalists believed had led America into the disastrous war in the first place. The convention that met in Hartford in December 1814 approved resolutions to end the disproportionate power of the southern states through the constitutional provision that counted slaves at the rate of three-fifths
of a person when apportioning representation in Congress and the Electoral College, break the hold of the “Virginia dynasty” by barring the election of a president from the same state in two successive terms, and require a two-thirds vote of Congress to declare war or restrict trade. They more than hinted that disunion would be the next step if their demands were not met. Madison, when he heard the news, was “miserably shattered and woe-begone,” Washington lawyer William Wirt reported after seeing the president. Madison dismissed New England as suffering a “delusion” comparable to “the reign of witchcraft,” but the outcome of the Hartford Convention seemed to have almost physically beaten him down.66
The Federal Republican, as vehemently anti-administration as ever, predicted in early January 1815 that there was “an explosion at hand; that the President would be called on to resign; and there must be peace by that or a future Administration.” The “explosion” was expected to come from New Orleans: for weeks there had been reports of a huge British naval and military force assembling in Jamaica preparing to launch an attack there. Cochrane had included the city as a likely target back in July in a long list of options he had sent to Melville, and in mid-September approval had come back from London. Whoever controlled New Orleans would control the Mississippi River, and once again Cochrane was convinced the decisive blow was at hand.67
On December 16, 1814, after sweeping aside five American navy gunboats guarding the entrance to Lake Borgne, a British invasion force that would eventually reach 6,000 began disembarking at Isle aux Pois, about thirty miles from New Orleans. An advance column of 1,600 men reached the mainland a week later, and three small battles were fought over the ensuing week as the British force probed the defenses around the city.
Andrew Jackson, now a major general in the regular army and in command of the entire district of Louisiana, had chosen his defensive position well. The Mississippi River held his right flank, a cypress swamp his left, and an earthwork parapet protected by a four-foot-deep ditch sheltered nearly five thousand American troops. Seven artillery batteries spaced at fifty- to two-hundred-yard intervals supported the entrenched position, and before the American lines lay a broad open plain that the British would have to traverse to reach them. The British plan was to begin with a night attack to seize two guns that Jackson had unwisely placed in a weakly guarded position across the river, then turn the guns on the main American line as the major British assault began at dawn. But as the Battle of New Orleans began on January 8, 1815, the British attack fell disastrously behind schedule. It was not until daylight that the two guns were seized, and then it took an hour and a half for the main British force to begin its advance toward Jackson’s breastworks. At first a heavy fog shrouded their movement, but it suddenly lifted as the British were still hundreds of yards from their enemy, and the grape and canister began cutting them to pieces. The British commander, General Edward Pakenham, was eviscerated by a blast of grape three hundred yards from the American line as he rode ahead trying to rally his men forward. In half an hour the British lost 2,000 men, including nearly 200 killed and 500 taken prisoner. Total American casualties were 70, and nearly all of those were among the men in the exposed position across the river; the Americans behind Jackson’s breastworks lost 6 killed and 7 wounded. It was one of the most lopsided battles ever fought.68
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