Perilous Fight
Page 47
Bainbridge returned to Boston in a seething resentment toward Decatur. He also once again began insisting that the command of the navy yard was his by right. Hull once again had been appointed to succeed Bainbridge in that command, and Hull came downstairs to breakfast on the morning of November 20, 1815, to find a note from Bainbridge “couched in not a very pleasing style,” as Hull told Rodgers, “saying that he had been ordered from this station without his consent and that he now claimed it again, that he considered his removal merely temporary, to be held for him until his return.”28
Hull refused to budge; Secretary Crowninshield confirmed his appointment; but Bainbridge was now the senior commander afloat in Boston and did everything he could to make Hull’s life miserable, constantly giving orders about details of the management of the yard and forcing Hull to appeal to the secretary to have them overruled. Bainbridge managed to get the clerk of the navy yard to secretly supply him with copies of Hull’s correspondence; Susan Bainbridge began gossiping around town with disparaging stories about Ann Hull; then Bainbridge began spreading a story in navy circles that Hull had pledged to keep the place for him and had gone back on his word. He wrote sneeringly to Porter about “Hull’s just claim,” adding, “Captain Hull and myself cannot be on friendly terms.” Porter was growing weary of Bainbridge’s campaign and tried to suggest he desist, which prompted another typical Bainbridge plaint of wounded innocence: he was merely exercising “the honesty of self-defense,” he insisted.29
For his part, Hull angrily wrote Secretary Crowninshield about Bainbridge, “I am not willing to allow that he has done more than I have for the good of the country, his opinion to the contrary notwithstanding.” Rodgers had been asked by the secretary to provide a confidential evaluation of all the captains in the service, and his brief remarks on Bainbridge spoke volumes, especially the crossed-out word that was still perfectly legible, as it was no doubt intended to be: “An excellent officer, uniting much practice with considerable theory; he is also industrious, and if there is any objection to him, it is because he feels the importance of his own consequence abilities too sensibly to qualify him as well as he otherwise would for subordinate position.”30
One day late in 1819 Decatur was walking along a street in Washington when a carriage came to a sudden stop alongside and Bainbridge leapt out, seized Decatur’s hand in both of his, and said, “Decatur, I behaved like a great fool, but I hope you will forgive me; but you always contrive to reap laurels from my misfortunes.”31 Susan Decatur was instantly suspicious of Bainbridge’s motives. A year earlier James Barron had returned to the United States for the first time since the war. Barron had again appealed to be reinstated to the navy; Decatur along with almost every other senior officer opposed him. In June 1819 Barron initiated what became an increasingly heated exchange of letters between the two men that was unmistakably an attempt by Barron to generate a pretext for challenging Decatur to a duel. Decatur’s official actions as an officer of his court-martial back in 1808 or now as one of three members of the new Board of Naval Commissioners could not be considered the kind of personal insult that could justify a duel. So the entire correspondence turned on an almost hairsplitting discussion of a point of honor in which Barron in effect tried to get Decatur to say that he believed Barron was unworthy of meeting on a field of honor—which would be the kind of insult that would allow Barron to issue a challenge. Charles Morris tried to get Decatur to agree to a short statement that would clear the air, but Decatur refused to conceal his contempt for Barron as their correspondence grew more heated. By November, Decatur’s letters were running nineteen pages long and heading to their inevitable conclusion.32
And so Bainbridge had shown up, professing sudden friendship for a rival he had keenly disliked for years, and on March 8, 1820, Bainbridge was negotiating the arrangements for a meeting on the dueling grounds of Bladensburg as Decatur’s second. Barron’s second was Captain Jesse Elliott, another officer full of petty resentments who, it would later come out, had pushed Barron again and again to keep the feud with Decatur going whenever it threatened to die out. Decatur left all the details for the arrangement to the seconds, and the terms they agreed to were extraordinary in several ways. The distance was eight paces, and the parties were to take aim before the signal to fire was given, rather than standing with their arms at the side as was usual. It virtually guaranteed a fatal outcome.
On March 22, 1820, the two men met at ten o’clock in the morning. “I never was your enemy,” Decatur said, a declaration that should have prompted the seconds to halt the affair then and there according to the rules of honor; but Elliott hurriedly shouted, “Gentlemen, back to your places,” and gave the word to fire. Each man was struck in the hip; Barron’s wound was not fatal, but the bullet he fired glanced off Decatur’s hip socket and severed both arteries in the groin. Decatur died in agonizing pain twelve hours later at his house a block from the White House. He was forty-one years old.33
Ten thousand people came out for the funeral procession that bore Decatur’s body through Washington two days later, including President Monroe, the Supreme Court, and members of both houses of Congress. Susan Decatur was forever convinced that Bainbridge and Elliott had conspired to bring about her husband’s death and was probably right, though when the correspondence between Barron and Decatur was subsequently published, public sympathy shifted somewhat toward Barron. John Quincy Adams wrote sadly that Decatur possessed “a sense of honor too disdainful of life.”34
William Jones managed to recoup his lost personal fortune by going into business with the Philadelphia shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys in a successful venture to build steamships.35 He died in 1831 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on his way to the Pocono Mountains to escape the summer fever raging in Philadelphia, and was granted his dying request to be buried in the beautiful cemetery of the Moravian Church, whose pacifism and neutrality between Britain and America during the Revolution had made its members outcasts in a country born and periodically sustained by the disdain of life and bloodshed of war.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AC Annals of Congress
ASP American State Papers
HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania
LC Library of Congress, Manuscript Division
MeHS Maine Historical Society
MHS Massachusetts Historical Society
NDB Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers
NMM National Maritime Museum, U.K.
NW1812 The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History
SCL South Caroliniana Library
TNA The National Archives, U.K.
WMSC College of William and Mary, Special Collections Research Center
Prologue
1. Hickey, Don’t Give Up the Ship, 364–66.
2. Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, August 4, 1812, Jefferson Papers, LC.
3. “Disaster on Disaster on Land,” Columbian Centinel, February 17, 1813.
4. Osgood, Solemn Protest, 9.
5. Adams, Education of Henry Adams, 53.
6. Dye, “Early American Seafarers,” 340–41.
7. Humphrey, Press of the Young Republic, 85.
8. William Jones to James Madison, May 10, 1814, Madison Papers, LC.
9. Adams, “Birth of a World Power.”
10. Foster, Jeffersonian America, 5.
1. In Barbary
1. Edward Preble to William Bainbridge, March 12, 1804, NDB, III: 489.
2. McKee, Edward Preble, 47.
3. Ibid., 98–99.
4. Albert Gallatin to Thomas Jefferson, August 16, 1802, Jefferson Papers, LC.
5. Preble quoted in McKee, Edward Preble, 136–37.
6. Martin, Most Fortunate Ship, 44–46; McKee, Edward Preble, 123–24.
7. Preble quoted in McKee, Edward Preble, 137–38.
8. Morris, Autobiography, 18–19.
9. Edward Preble to secretary of the navy, December 10, 1803, N
DB, III: 256–60.
10. Preble quoted in McKee, Edward Preble, 181–82.
11. Edward Preble to James Leander Cathcart, January 4, 1804, NDB, III: 311.
12. Edward Preble to secretary of the navy, December 10, 1803, NDB, III: 256.
13. McKee, Edward Preble, 227–33; Tucker, Stephen Decatur, 45.
14. Edward Preble to Tobias Lear, January 31, 1804, NDB, III: 377–78; Preble to secretary of the navy, NDB, III: 384–86; Preble to George Davis, NDB, III: 386; Tucker, Stephen Decatur, 46.
15. Edward Preble to Charles Stewart, January 31, 1804, NDB, III: 375.
16. NDB, III: 388.
17. Tucker, Stephen Decatur, 1–2, 30–32; Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 69–70.
18. McKee, Edward Preble, 193–94.
19. Edward Preble to secretary of the navy, February 19, 1804, NDB, III: 440–41.
20. Heermann’s statement in Goldsborough, United States’ Naval Chronicle, 257–58n.
21. Journal of Midshipman F. Cornelius deKrafft, Brig Syren, February 3, 1804, NDB, III: 388–89; Edward Preble to Charles Stewart, January 31, 1804, NDB, III: 375–76; Preble to Stephen Decatur, January 31, 1804, NDB, III: 376–77; affidavit of Midshipman Edmund P. Kennedy, NDB, III: 420–21.
22. Morris, Autobiography, 25–26; Journal of Midshipman F. Cornelius deKrafft, Brig Syren, February 8, 1804, NDB, III: 399.
23. Morris, Autobiography, 26–28; Midshipman Ralph Izard Jr., to Mrs. Ralph Izard Sr., February 20, 1804, NDB, III: 416–17; McKee, Edward Preble, 196–97.
24. Affidavit of Surgeon’s Mate Lewis Heermann, NDB, III: 416–20; “Reminiscences &c by Lewis Heermann Surgeon U.S. Navy—1826,” House Committee on Naval Affairs, Claim of Susan Decatur, quoted in McKee, Edward Preble, 197–98.
25. Stephen Decatur to Edward Preble, February 17, 1804, NDB, III: 414–15; Charles Stewart to Preble, February 19, 1804, NDB, III: 415–16; Journal of Midshipman F. Cornelius deKrafft, Brig Syren, February 17, 1804, NDB, III: 431–32.
26. Cowdery, American Captives, 11; Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 110; William Bainbridge, February 18, 1804, NDB, III: 432–33.
27. Cowdery, American Captives, 4–11.
28. Harris, Commodore Bainbridge, 91–92.
29. Long, Ready to Hazard, vii–viii.
30. Ibid., 25, 42–43.
31. Ibid., 4–5, 270–71; Harris, Commodore Bainbridge, 247.
32. William Bainbridge to Edward Preble, November 1, 1803, NDB, III: 171.
33. William Bainbridge to secretary of the navy, November 1, 1803, NDB, III: 171–73; Bainbridge to Edward Preble, November 6, 1803, NDB, III: 173; Bainbridge to Preble, November 12, 1803, NDB, III: 173–74. For an example of letters from Bainbridge to friends begging for reassurance that he was not being “censured” at home, see Bainbridge to William Jones, January 20, 1804, Jones Papers, HSP.
34. “Documents Referred to in Captain Bainbridge’s Letter,” United States Gazette, March 27, 1804; Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 75–76.
35. “Extracts of a Letter from an Officer on Board the Philadelphia Frigate Dated at Tripoli,” Salem Gazette, April 3, 1804.
36. Long, Ready to Hazard, 82, 85; McKee, Gentlemanly Profession, 214; William Bainbridge, February 18, 1804, NDB, III: 432–33; Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 89–90, 98, 99, 104.
37. Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 110–11.
38. Ibid., 87, 101.
39. Ibid., 77, 84.
40. Long, Ready to Hazard, 57–58; Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 74–75.
41. Rea, Letter to Bainbridge, 13, 23; Smith, Naval Scenes, 6; Durand, Life and Adventures, 18.
42. McKee, Gentlemanly Profession, 174–77, 214–15; McKee, Edward Preble, 71–72.
43. London, Victory in Tripoli, 55, 203; McKee, Edward Preble, 298, 305, 336–37; Cowdery, American Captives, 19–20; Toll, Six Frigates, 248.
44. Long, Ready to Hazard, 98; Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 158–59; Cowdery, American Captives, 15, 16–17.
45. Long, Ready to Hazard, 43–44, 101; McKee, Edward Preble, 312–14, 335.
2. Honor’s Shoals
1. Augustus Foster to Lady Elizabeth Foster, December 30, 1804, February 5, 1805, June 2, 1805, Foster, ed., Two Duchesses, 196–98, 203–5, 225–26.
2. Adams, First Administration of Jefferson, II: 363–72.
3. Perkins, Prologue to War, 98–99; Adams, First Administration of Jefferson, I: 43, 45, 52–53, 55, 129.
4. Moore quoted in Perkins, Prologue to War, 8.
5. Perkins, Prologue to War, 5, 7.
6. Foster, “Notes,” 78, 102–6.
7. Adams, First Administration of Jefferson, I: 12–32.
8. Historical Statistics of the United States, 139; Adams, First Administration of Jefferson, I: 31–33.
9. Adams, First Administration of Jefferson, I: 18, 30–31; Foster, “Notes,” 70–72; Perkins, Prologue to War, 68.
10. Albert Gallatin to Thomas Jefferson, April 16, 1807, Jefferson Papers, LC; William Bainbridge to William Jones, January 20, 1804, Jones Papers, HSP; Contract for Sale of Opium to Young Tom, Canton, September 3, 1805, Jones Papers, HSP; Balinky, “Albert Gallatin,” 293–95, 304.
11. Tucker and Reuter, Injured Honor, 33–34; Dye, “Early American Seafarers,” 339–40, 356–57; Lewis, Social History, 294–95.
12. Dye, “Early American Seafarers,” 348–53; Bolster, “Black Seamen,” 1174, 1180–87, 1194.
13. Whitbread quoted in Perkins, Prologue to War, 19.
14. Horsman, Causes of War of 1812, 33–36; Brougham quoted in Perkins, Prologue to War, 20; Sheffield in NW1812, I: 21.
15. Foster quoted in Perkins, Prologue to War, 28.
16. Daily Advertiser, February 20, 1804; June 18, 1804; August 6, 1804; August 9, 1804.
17. Hall, Fragments of Voyages, I: 285, 289–90.
18. Adams, Second Administration of Jefferson, I: 92; Crowninshield, “American Trade,” 114; Baring, Inquiry, 95.
19. Sentence of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Nassau, New Providence, in the case of the Brig Essex, Joseph Orne Master, NW1812, I: 17–21.
20. Stephen, War in Disguise, 8, 12–13, 92, 155, 203.
21. Adams, Second Administration of Jefferson, I: 199–200; Barclay, Correspondence, 232–39.
22. Bainbridge quoted in Long, Ready to Hazard, 105.
23. Thomas Jefferson to Jacob Crowninshield, May 13, 1806, Jefferson Papers, LC.
24. Jefferson quoted in Perkins, Prologue to War, 121.
25. Madison, Selected Writings, 279.
26. Perkins, Prologue to War, 5; Grenville quoted in ibid., 74; Merry quoted in Adams, Second Administration of Jefferson, I: 202.
27. Balinky, “Albert Gallatin,” 294, 296–98; 301.
28. ASP, Naval Affairs, I: 78–79, 104–8; Thomas Jefferson to Gouverneur Morris, May 8, 1801, Jefferson Papers, LC.
29. McKee, Edward Preble, 338–41; Thomas Jefferson to James Barron, May 23, 1807, James Barron Papers, WMSC; NW1812, I: liii, 2.
30. AC, 9th Cong., 1st sess. (March 5, 1806), 558–59; (March 11, 1806), 706–7.
31. NW1812, I: 12–15.
32. Mayhew, “Jeffersonian Gunboats,” 101–2; Chapelle, American Sailing Navy, 208; Tucker, “Gunboats in Service,” 97; ASP, Naval Affairs, I: 200; Paul Hamilton to Langdon Cheves, December 3, 1811, NW1812, I: 53–59.
33. Susan Jackson to secretary of the navy, October 31, 1808, quoted in McKee, Gentlemanly Profession, 156; Decatur quoted in Smith, “Means to an End,” 118; NW1812, I: 12.
34. “By his Excellency William Shirley … A Proclamation,” Boston Post-Boy, November 23, 1747; “Two Letters Sent from His Excellency Governor Shirley,” Boston Post-Boy, December 14, 1747; Zimmerman, Impressment, 11.
35. Durand, Life and Adventures, 66, 127.
36. Lewis, Social History, 119, 134.
37. Durand, Life and Adventures, 64–65.
38. Lewis, Social History, 134.
39. Ibid., 86–95.
40. Ibid., 105–7, 115.
41. Zimmerman, Impressment, 265–67.
42. Durand, Life and Adventures, 49–50; Dalton, “Letters”; Perkins, Prologue to War, 86–88.
43. Daily Advertiser, May 22, August 10, August 29, October 20, 1804; New-York Gazette, March 22, July 24, 1805. One ship recaptured by her American crew was the Eugenia. Taken off Sandy Hook, she was ordered for Halifax when her American captain, pretending to be ignorant of the coast, advised the British prize master to put into New London for a pilot; once ashore, the captain rounded up thirty armed men who rowed back to the ship and overpowered the British prize crew. See Daily Advertiser, August 9, 1804.
44. Zimmerman, Impressment, 18, 26, 119; Perkins, Prologue to War, 92.
45. Zimmerman, Impressment, 109–10, 114.
46. James Madison to George Joy, May 22, 1807, Madison Papers, LC; Adams quoted in Zimmerman, Impressment, 176.
47. William Henry Allen to William Allen, March 30, 1807, Allen, “Letters,” 206–8.
48. De Kay, Rage for Glory, 78–79.
49. McKee, Edward Preble, 310.
50. Tucker and Reuter, Injured Honor, 86; Toll, Six Frigates, 260.
51. James Barron to Franklin Wharton, September 14, 1806, and James Barron to John Rodgers, January 20, 1807, James Barron Papers, WMSC; Franklin Wharton and Thomas Tingey to Rodgers, January 31, 1807, Rodgers Family Papers, Naval Historical Foundation Collection, LC.