by Ron Carter
© 2005 Ron Carter.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City Utah 30178. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book. Deseret Book is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carter, Ron, 1932-
By the dawn's early light / Ron Carter.
p. cm. — (Prelude to glory ; v. 9)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-59038-438-5 (alk. paper)
1. United States—History—War of 1812—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PS3553.A7833B9 2005
813'.54—dc22 2005017329
Printed in the United States of America
Sheridan Books Inc., Ann Arbor, MI
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This series is dedicated to the common people of long ago who paid the price
This volume is dedicated to the freedom and liberty so dearly bought
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prologue
Part One
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
Bibliography
Introduction
Washington, June 1, 1812
To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States:
I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation of those heretofore laid before them on the subject of our affairs with Great Britain.
British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it, not in the exercises of a belligerent right founded on the law of nations against an enemy, but of a municipal prerogative o’er British Subjects.
Whether the United States shall continue passive under these progressive usurpations and these accumulating wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defense of their natural rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Dispoiser of Events . . . is a solemn question . . . .
James Madison
President, United States
The mad ambition, the lust for power, and commercial avarice of Great Britain, have left to neutral nations an alternative only between the base surrender of their rights and a manly vindication of them. I plead most vigorously an immediate appeal to arms.
John C. Calhoun
Chair, Foreign Relations Committee
House of Representatives
June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain for the second time.
Prologue
* * *
By June of 1807, the United States had been a free and independent nation for forty years, and it had been governing itself under the Constitution for just under thirty years. The American people were proud of these achievements, which no previous nation on earth could match. But these were hard-won victories, none of them guaranteed or foreordained. And there always was the possibility that things won even with such labor and pain could be lost, or taken away.
The Constitution went into effect on March 4, 1789, but the new House of Representatives did not achieve a quorum for doing business until 1 April, and the new Senate only amassed a quorum on 6 April. The new government thus had a slow and worrisome start, but it soon acquired momentum. Within a year it had established and set into motion the presidency, executive departments, and courts. Within two years it had proposed, and the states had ratified, amendments to the Constitution popularly known as the Bill of Rights. And its officials were hard at work, dealing with the major problem facing the United States—its staggering burden of debt from the Revolution.
Americans assured one another and the rest of the world that they had devised a new science of politics—but they could not agree on how it was to work or on what kind of nation it was to foster. As a result, Americans who had taken the same side against Great Britain now viewed one another with suspicion and distrust. Those who favored the brash, energetic treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal plans for restoring the nation’s public credit confronted those who joined Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s and Representative James Madison’s opposition to those plans. Would the United States be a nation of sturdy yeoman farmers, as Jefferson and Madison hoped, tilling the soil and refusing to risk the corruption and decadence of the Old World? Or would the United States encourage commerce and manufacturing, as Hamilton urged, rivaling the great powers of Britain and France and becoming a wealthy, powerful, and respected nation? Would the government authorized by the Constitution be strictly limited in its powers to those clearly authorized by the text, as Jefferson and Madison urged? Or would there be a bold and innovative government, claiming whatever powers were not specifically denied by the Constitution, as Hamilton maintained it should be? The divisions between these brilliant, confident, and stubborn men both shaped and reflected divisions emerging among the people as a whole.
Domestic issues seemed to promise trouble enough for the new nation. But then, in 1789, the French Revolution burst on the world. Some Americans agreed with Jefferson, embracing the French Revolution as the French people’s bid to learn from the American Revolution, sweeping away centuries of corruption and oppression. Others agreed with Hamilton and John Adams that the French Revolution promised nothing but disaster. The matter worsened in 1793, when the French executed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and then plunged into war with the rest of Europe. Should the United States honor its 1778 treaty of alliance and friendship with France, or should it remain neutral, or should it take sides with the old monarchies of Europe against the dangerous French Republic?
President George Washington struggled to hold the nation on a steady course, as he struggled also to hold his cabinet together. The United States indeed stayed neutral in 1793 and thereafter, but the controversy further widened the splits among the people of the United States. By the mid-1790s, two loose partisan alliances competed for power and votes—the Federalists, led by Hamilton and Adams, and the Republicans, led by Jefferson and Madison. At first President Washington refused to take sides, trying to set an impartial standard for his countrymen. But, as partisan strife worsened and the pressures of age and politics wore him down, he sided more and more with Hamilton and the Federalists.
In September 1796, Washington announced his decision to retire from the presidency after two terms of office. In the election that fall, the electoral votes made Vice President John Adams the narrow but clear victor; but his rival, Thomas Jefferson, amassed the second-highest number of votes and became Adams’s vice president. At his inauguration, Adams imagined that Washington was saying to him, “Aye, you a
re fairly in and I am fairly out. We will see which one of us is happiest.” Awed by Washington, Adams kept Washington’s cabinet as his own, even though its members looked down on him and repeatedly sought advice and leadership behind Adams’s back from Alexander Hamilton, now a lawyer in private practice in New York City.
Adams’s presidency was turbulent and unhappy. Attempting to smooth over the difficult relations between France and the United States, he sent a three-man diplomatic team to open negotiations—but French stubbornness, and the strong hint from three French officials (whom the Americans in their report to Adams called X, Y, and Z) that a bribe would be the only way to grease the wheel of diplomacy, enraged Charles C. Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry. When news of the impasse broke, the American people reacted with fury against France. Congress proposed a package of laws designed to protect national security against enemy aliens and those who dared to criticize the president or other leaders of the government. The government’s prosecutors used these laws against newspaper editors who dared to criticize Adams’s war policies, one of the editors a member of the United States House of Representatives. Although the two nations never declared war on each other, the United States Navy fought a series of engagements with French vessels, and Adams called George Washington out of retirement to command a newly assembled American army, guarding against the possibility of a French invasion. To Adams’s dismay, Washington insisted that Hamilton be named his second-in-command.
As time passed, however, Adams became more and more convinced that such an invasion never would happen, and he brooded over the possibility that Hamilton would use the army to make himself a dictator. Washington’s death in December 1799 solidified Adams’s decision not to continue with the war. He decided to send a new diplomatic mission to France, overruling his outraged cabinet members. Then Adams discovered that his chief advisors had been taking their marching orders from Hamilton. In a towering rage, he demanded the resignation of Secretary of War James McHenry and fired Secretary of State Timothy Pickering. Hamilton, equally outraged after a shouting match with the president, stalked off and penned a vitriolic pamphlet attacking Adams’s character and conduct. He hoped to circulate this pamphlet privately among key Federalist leaders, but somehow the pamphlet got into the newspapers, embarrassing Adams and Hamilton alike and advertising to the world that the Federalists were splitting down the middle. Not even the success of Adams’s emissaries to France could stop the Federalist free-fall in public opinion.
Meanwhile, the Republicans were united behind Vice President Jefferson and his chosen running-mate, former Senator Aaron Burr of New York. In the voting that fall, it became clear that the Republicans would take both houses of Congress and capture the presidency as well—but an unexpected development threw the nation into confusion. Jefferson and Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each. Burr was ready to defer to Jefferson, but the vehement demands of Jefferson’s backers that Burr deny that he was worthy to be considered for president as opposed to Jefferson angered the proud New Yorker. In turn, the Jeffersonians became convinced that Burr was going to do a deal behind their backs with the defeated Federalists to grab the Presidency for himself. At the same time, an aghast Alexander Hamilton, who had distrusted and feared Burr since 1789, wrote a series of letters to leading Federalist politicians begging them not to deal with Burr, whose ambition was for himself and without any restraint of principle.
In cases where no candidate received a clear majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives had to resolve the deadlock. In February 1801, the old House—the new House would not convene until that December—met and voted in ballot after ballot. Not until the thirty-sixth ballot did the House finally agree on Jefferson as the victor.
Early on the morning of March 4, 1801, John Adams boarded a coach to take him home to Quincy, Massachusetts. He was not only hurt by his defeat by his former friend and ally, Jefferson; he was mourning the death of his son Charles, who either had drowned by accident or committed suicide after having lost a large sum of money entrusted to him by his oldest brother, John Quincy Adams. Later that morning, Jefferson arose in his boarding house, dressed carefully, and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue in the city newly renamed Washington to the site of the Capitol of the United States. Only one wing had been completed, and it was there, before the assembled senators and representatives and other onlookers, that he took the oath of office from Chief Justice John Marshall. It was the first successful transfer of power from one political party to another, and Jefferson realized the importance of the event. He termed his victory in the election of 1800 a revolution as important as that of 1776.
Jefferson’s first term in office was a great success. His efficient and capable treasury secretary, the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, did great work in paring down the national debt and regularizing American finances—though Gallatin concluded that Hamilton’s system was so well established and so well devised that it could not and should not be cast aside. Jefferson and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Madison, sought to chart a careful course for the United States through the troubled waters of great-power politics. In particular, when the diplomatic team he sent to France to negotiate with First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte for the purchase of New Orleans reported instead that they had been offered a deal for the entire Louisiana Territory, Jefferson seized the opportunity—though wondering whether it was constitutional to do so. At the same time, he planned a major military, scientific, and diplomatic exploration of the vast Louisiana Territory, to be led by his secretary and distant relative Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lewis’s chosen colleague, Captain William Clark. His major disappointment was that he and his allies in Congress could not use the impeachment power to clear the federal bench of Federalist judges committed, as he feared, to blocking his administration’s measures and distorting the Constitution’s meaning.
Jefferson triumphantly won re-election in 1804, but his second term was nowhere near as successful as his first. Whereas in his first term he had taken the lead in defining American policies and shaping events, in his second term events over which he had little control dominated what he tried to do. Former Vice President Aaron Burr, dropped from the Republican ticket in early 1804, had killed Alexander Hamilton in a controversial duel in New Jersey. Burr then had helped to frustrate the impeachment campaign by presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial of Justice Samuel Chase, Burr’s last act as vice president. In early 1805, Burr headed west, engaging in mysterious discussions and murky plans with western politicians and sparking a host of rumors about his plans. Convinced that Burr intended to detach the western states and territories from the United States and establish himself as an emperor, Jefferson ordered Burr’s seizure and arrest and hoped that he would be tried for and convicted of treason.
The most worrisome thing for Jefferson, however, was world affairs. His first term had seen a temporary cooling of hostilities between Napoleonic France, which had conquered most of Europe, and the alliance of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Now the European continent was at war again, and each side was determined to cripple its adversary’s trade. The United States had profited from trading with the several warring powers, but now its ships were fair prey under the generally accepted laws of war. Nobody knew what the new nation would do if its honor and its flag were insulted on the high seas . . .
Richard B. Bernstein
Part One
Atlantic Ocean, twelve miles east of the Virginia Capes
June 22, 1807
CHAPTER I
* * *
The shout, too high, too strained, came cracking down from the crow’s nest, seventy feet up the mainmast of the American Navy man-of-war USS Chesapeake.
“Sail! Nor’east, stern, portside. About three miles.”
Every sun- and wind-burned face on the main deck of the small frigate jerked upward, squinting into the blinding light of the midday sun in a cloudless late June sky, to see the outthrust arm of the barefoot
ed, bearded seaman, wearing the uniform of the fledgling United States Navy, pointing over the stern toward a sail those on deck could not yet see. For one breathless second the only sounds were the warm northeast wind in the rigging, the creaking of the two masts and six yardarms, and the quiet hiss of the sixteen-foot curl the little ship was cutting in the green-black waters of the Atlantic. Then the main-deck crew moved as one man to the stern of the ship, feet spread slightly against the gentle roll of the deck, hands shading their narrowed eyes as they carefully swept the straight line where the sky met the sea. There was no sail—nothing but the flat horizon.
Captain James Barron, United States Navy, tall, angular, long face, jutting chin, feet and hands too big, stood at his place on the quarterdeck next to the wheel, facing the stern, one huge hand shading his squinted eyes as he peered northeast. Beside him stood his first officer, Lieutenant George Budd, shorter, strongly built, both hands shading his slitted eyes as he studied the skyline, searching for the tell-tale fleck that would become a ship. His lined, aging, leathery face bore a prominent scar across the meat of his left cheek where a British musket ball had ripped a four-inch channel in the wild, desperate fight on Chesapeake Bay in August of 1781, when the French and British navies had collided head-on to determine whether British general Charles Cornwallis and his six thousand red-coated regulars, landlocked and surrounded by thirteen thousand American regulars and French infantry at the tiny tobacco-trading village of Yorktown, where the York River empties into the Bay, would remain British soldiers, or become American prisoners of war.