New York at War
Page 16
With British warships plying the waters off Sandy Hook and Long Island, New Yorkers took the threat of attack very seriously. They faced it with Jonathan Williams’s chain of harbor forts and with several new batteries that were rushed to completion on the Greenwich Village shore, at Corlears Hook facing the Navy Yard, and on Staten Island overlooking the Narrows. But the protection of New York would also take soldiers, and before long the city was playing host to a motley array of militia units. The city itself mustered ten regiments of infantrymen, three artillery regiments, and a cavalry squadron. There was the Old Butcher Troop, consisting exclusively of men of that vocation, dressed in buckskin breeches and blue coats trimmed with silver lace. The Brooklyn Fusiliers were popularly known as the Katydids for the green and yellow of their uniforms. By early 1813, 3,500 New York and New Jersey militiamen and US Army troops guarded the city, most of them posted to the harbor forts.28
Yet officials and officers warned that more men were needed. With a frugal Congress refusing to expand the ranks of the regular army, states tried to rely on their own militias. Able-bodied men ages eighteen to forty-five were legally obliged to serve in the state militia, but New Yorkers both upstate and down resented duty as a burden that took them away from their workshops or farms. Once the war began, bad news from Canada, where American forces initially stumbled from one humiliating disaster to another, hindered militia enlistments. Instead, many New Yorkers eligible for militia duty evaded it. Rich men paid substitutes to serve in their place, as they were legally entitled to do; poorer men did not show up for musters or disappeared. The need for men produced the inevitable abuses; some made a wartime career of repeatedly enlisting for bounty money and deserting. One bounty jumper, caught and jailed on Governors Island, was put in front of a firing squad, blindfolded—and pardoned at the last second.29
While Daniel Tompkins, New York governor and commander of the Third US Military District, worried about inadequate numbers, he also fretted about the caliber of the men who had shown up. Whether from the far reaches of the Catskills or the Manhattan streets, the average militiaman was unruly and insufficiently trained. Moreover, arms and ammunition were in short supply. Few militiamen reenlisted after their ninety-day terms expired; green troops, ignorant of the rudiments of harbor defense, took their place. Major General Morgan Lewis complained that militia officers “permit their men to stray from their camp at all hours.” One militiaman caught in larceny was led through the streets to the doleful melody of “The Rogue’s March” with a sign reading “Thief ” hanging around his neck; worse still, he was deprived of his whiskey ration for one month.30
One group of volunteers did render heroic service. Mobilized in the fall of 1812, the Sea Fencibles were meant to serve both on land and at sea as a “marine militia.” Their mission was to guard the port’s outer fringe, where the lonely sandbars and bluffs facing the Atlantic offered the British potential landings for invasion. The five hundred men of the Fencibles were recruited largely from the ranks of the city’s seamen, boatmen, and fishermen, men liable to Royal Navy impressment and thus with a score to settle. Their commander, Jacob Lewis, had captained a privateer, the Bunker Hill, at the start of the war. While his surviving letters suggest a man of some education and literary polish, he was also at home in the East River’s boatyards and sail lofts, and he shared the egalitarian republicanism of his men.
The weapons of the Sea Fencibles were the musket, the boarding pike, and, most importantly, the forty-five-foot gunboat armed with one or two cannon. Essentially a long rowboat, propelled by oars or by sail, it could carry about three dozen armed men. From its base at Spermaceti Cove within the arm of Sandy Hook, Lewis’s flotilla of thirty-one gunboats moved swiftly through the port’s waters. The Federalist gentlemen who populated the navy’s officer corps might smirk at this seaborne rabble, but New York City’s government—thankful for any help it could get in protecting the coast—didn’t. As for Commodore Lewis, he had full confidence in his men. “They shall be amphibious soldiers,” he wrote to Secretary of State James Monroe. “I am perfectly satisfied to command what has been always despised by the Navy.”31
For two years, Lewis and his men played cat and mouse with the British. In late March 1813, Admiral Warren announced to the admiralty his intention of seizing Sandy Hook and making it a base for British depredations on American shipping into and out of New York. Such a move would effectively make the British blockade of the Narrows airtight, and afford a launching point for further operations. Lewis, and other New Yorkers, sensed what was coming. “The enemy are at the Hook” was “the universal cry of the city,” he wrote to Navy Secretary William Jones in May. A week later, seven boatloads of British sailors from the blockading warships tried to land on the Hook, relying on the dead of night and muffled oars to surprise the Fencibles stationed there; they were scared off when the aroused sentries started firing on them. The raid may have been less a concerted invasion than a ploy by the timorous Warren to appease an impatient admiralty. Nonetheless, the presence of the Fencibles had deterred a British assault on the city’s threshold.32
Next, Lewis took the war to the British. On the Fourth of July, his men disguised a pilot boat, the Yankee, as a fishing smack. Three men posed as fishermen on deck; forty-three others, armed with muskets, hid on the foredeck and in the cabin. Sailing off the Hook, the Yankee soon lured its target, the British sloop of war Eagle, which had been seizing fishing boats and burning vessels at will. As the British sloop drew alongside, the Fencibles jumped from their cover and opened fire, killing a master’s mate and a midshipman and capturing eleven Royal Marines. Jubilant spectators lined the Whitehall Dock at Manhattan’s tip as the Sea Fencibles delivered the Eagle and its crew to the people of New York City as an Independence Day gift. Two months later, Lewis took twenty-six gunboats up the East River and through Hell Gate to harass a British frigate and schooner that were seizing vessels and landing sailors near Rye to steal sheep. After an artillery exchange in which neither side hit the other, the confrontation ended inconclusively. But the British ships withdrew toward the east end of Long Island Sound, and the Sea Fencibles could claim the skirmish as a victory.33
Lewis’s Fencibles proved their mettle on land as well as at sea. One British tactic for taking American prizes was to drive them aground on New Jersey’s Atlantic shore as they tried to make a run into New York, and Lewis kept his men on the lookout for vessels in distress. In November 1813, the schooner John and Mary, bound from New Orleans to New York with a lucrative cargo of cotton, sugar, and lead, lurched to a stop on the beach near the village of Long Branch, twelve miles south of Spermaceti Cove. Trapped by the predatory Captain Lloyd’s seventy-four-gun Plantagenet, the hapless crew stood by as British sailors looted their schooner. Suddenly, one hundred Sea Fencibles materialized out of the dunes, having marched south from Sandy Hook. The Britons scattered to their boats and headed back to their mother ship. Captain Lloyd sent another boat ashore under a flag of truce. Lloyd insisted indignantly that the John and Mary was a legitimate prize of war. But he was also a reasonable man, and he offered to ransom the schooner and its cargo for $1,000. If the Americans refused, the Plantagenet would use its cannon to pummel Long Branch village, as well as the John and Mary, to pieces.
The Fencibles vowed to defend the grounded vessel. Under a cannonade from the British ship offshore, the Americans managed to offload much of the John and Mary’s cargo and cart it away; only one man was wounded. Losing interest, Lloyd sailed off in search of new prey, without leveling Long Branch. In January, the scene repeated itself, when the “flotilla men” marched down the beach again, this time dragging field artillery with them, to drive the British away from another grounded schooner, this one loaded with coal. The Fencibles safely and triumphantly brought the vessel into New York harbor. The boatmen of New York were proving to be their city’s first and most pugnacious line of defense.34
Serving under arms was not the only way New Yorkers could defend
their homes. War inflamed the imaginations of the city’s mechanical tinkerers. Among them was Robert Fulton, an engineer who, while busy building the world’s first truly viable steamboat in New York harbor, was convinced that his true place in history was as an inventor of weapons. Fulton had spent a decade in Europe trying to interest the British and French governments in sponsoring his two pet projects: a “plunging machine,” or submarine for military use, and a “torpedo”—really a floating mine for blowing up enemy warships.35
Fulton’s submarine was inspired by the Turtle, a contraption launched in New York harbor during the summer of 1776 by a Continental army soldier named David Bushnell. A pod-shaped wooden shell operated by a single passenger, the Turtle was supposed to get alongside the hull of Admiral Howe’s flagship and attach a time bomb to it. The attempt proved abortive—as did Fulton’s later efforts to interest the British and Napoleon in his refinements of Bushnell’s design. Fulton arrived in New York in 1806, at the right moment to interest the city fathers and Jonathan Williams in his torpedoes—floating wooden boxes containing gunpowder and detonators that exploded on impact or when set off by a clockwork timer. Once more, glory eluded him; before a crowd of thousands gathered at the Battery, Fulton floated torpedoes toward an abandoned brig anchored offshore, but as a spectator reported, “the brig most obstinately refused to be decomposed.”36
More successful was the scheme hatched by one John Scudder Jr. and two Manhattan merchants. In June 1813 Scudder fitted out a schooner, the Eagle, with a cargo to tantalize His Majesty’s navy—barrels of flour, provisions, and naval stores. Below decks, however, he imbedded a deadly booby trap: ten kegs of gunpowder and a cask of sulphur, concealed next to gunlocks that would fire when a cord tied to two flour barrels was jerked. Scudder and a small crew sailed the Eagle through Hell Gate into the waters off New London, where Sir Thomas Hardy, commander of HMS Ramillies, took the bait. After Scudder’s crew fled for shore, Hardy’s men seized the schooner, anchored it near the British frigate, and began unloading cargo. Scudder watched anxiously from the shore for over three hours. Then, suddenly, “a column of fire” shot up several hundred feet, raining pitch and tar down on the Ramillies’s deck. The Eagle, a British lieutenant, and ten of his sailors were instantly “blown to atoms.” The only disappointment was that the explosion spared the Ramillies and its six hundred crewmen.37
For a moment Scudder and his comrades were the toast of the South Street taverns, but Robert Fulton was not to be outshone. By early 1814 he was planning his pièce de résistance of port defense: a massive behemoth of a ship designed to make New York harbor unassailable. Called both Fulton I and Demologos (“The People Speak”), it would be the world’s first steam-powered warship, the culmination of the inventor’s career as a visionary of steam propulsion and mechanized weaponry. Paid for by Congress, which spent close to a quarter of a million dollars in expectation that it would become a prototype for coastal defense, its gargantuan wooden hull gradually took form in a shipyard at Corlears Hook on the East River. A workforce of 260 men built its hull and machinery. Its foundry-cast engine cylinder, weighing over three tons and “said to be equal to 120 horses,” was ready in July. Measuring 167 feet long, 56 feet in the beam, with vast paddle wheels and a hull 5 feet thick, Demologos would be a floating battery, carrying thirty-two guns firing “red hot shot,” some of it weighing a hundred pounds—a mobile version of the forts with which Jonathan Williams had lined the city’s approaches. Unlike every other military vessel afloat, it would not be at the mercy of wind or tide but would move under its own steam power at up to five miles an hour. At a height of twenty feet above the water line, Demologos towered over other vessels. No British flotilla brazen enough to brave the Narrows, Fulton believed, would dare face it.38
When Fulton’s Demologos was launched on October 29, it slid into the East River, according to the Evening Post, “amidst the roar of cannon and the shouts and acclamations of upwards of twenty thousand people, who had assembled to witness the event” along the Manhattan and Long Island shores. But the ship never gained the glory Fulton wished for it. By the time it was fitted out with the engine and tested in the harbor’s waters, the war was over. Naval officers judged it too cumbersome to be of use in the open sea, and Demologos ultimately languished in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a floating infirmary, without ever firing a shot at an enemy.39
The launching of Fulton I, also known as Demologos, October 29, 1814. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK.
While the Demologos was unsuccessful as an instrument of war, it arguably played a part in taking one life. Ill and exhausted, Fulton toiled obsessively on the ship during the winter of 1814–1815 at his workshop on the Jersey City shore. After returning to his Manhattan lodgings one night, he took to bed with severe pneumonia. He died on February 23, at age fifty, to be remembered for his steamboat—and the ferry landings (and, eventually, streets) that bore his name on either side of the East River—rather than for his weapons of mass destruction. But recognized or not, Fulton had inaugurated New York’s career as an incubator and cradle of mechanized warships that would help transform the nature of marine warfare.40
The full measure of that industrial revolution, however, would not be gauged for several decades. In the moment, the war’s economic impact made daily life hard for many. The British blockade was effective enough to create shortages; this, combined with the government’s requisition of foodstuffs and fuel for its fighting forces, brought a sharp inflation that outstripped the earnings of many working families. “The times are very hard . . . ,” a New York lady wrote to her sister in October 1813. “It is high time this cruel war was at an end.”
The economic stress of war intensified the sense of New York as a city under siege not only from the British warships hovering offshore, but also from foes much closer to home. Once more, New York appeared to be harboring enemies within its gates. The Royal Navy pounced so swiftly on vessels trying to sneak out of New York that it seemed obvious that local agents were providing the British with information about embarkations. Friendly fishermen and merchants covertly sailed out to the blockading fleets and sold them food. Republicans were primed to blast Manhattan’s Federalists as pro-British traitors, but it was hard to single out individuals when that party dominated much of the city’s public life. Instead, a more convenient scapegoat was found.41
At the start of the war, Charles Holt’s Republican paper, the Columbian, had called on the authorities “to put the laws immediately in force against alien enemies, and to rid the city of spies.” Such sentiment, aimed at the city’s community of British émigrés, harmonized with the policy of the Madison administration. On July 7, 1812, the State Department issued an order requiring all British subjects living in the United States to go to the nearest US marshal’s office to register their names and those of their family members, as well as their ages and places of residence. By April 1813, the names of 2,300 English citizens were on the books of Manhattan’s federal marshal. Any resident British alien traveling into or out of the city needed to carry a passport and check himself into the local marshal’s office on arrival.42
While British New Yorkers were neither prosecuted en masse nor deported, the registry system would linger as a humiliating memory of the war years. Such measures gratified the anger of native-born New Yorkers and offered a fleeting reassurance of security. But passports could not protect the city against the Royal Navy, should London adopt a more aggressive strategy. The key question remained unanswered: if New Yorkers peered seaward one day to see “all London afloat,” as many still living had done once before, could they rest assured that their defenses would hold?
This was the question of the hour during the spring and summer of 1814. Napoleon’s defeat in Europe freed up thousands of redcoats for redeployment to Britain’s American theater. In June, reports arrived confirming an ominous buildup of British reinforcements at Halifax and Bermuda. Governor Tompkins and Mayor De Witt Clinton used city money to hire spi
es who posed as friendly vendors, boarded Sir John Warren’s and Sir Thomas Hardy’s ships off Sandy Hook, and reported back that the British intended to attack the East Coast somewhere between Rhode Island and the Chesapeake. By mid-July, a special defense committee of the Common Council concluded that “the immense prize which this city affords to his cupidity” made New York a logical goal for the enemy’s invasion. An English lady living on Broadway even claimed she had received word from her relative, Admiral Sir George Cockburn, who hoped very soon to “have the honor to dine with her at her house, as he expected to be in command of the city of New York.”43
In response to the renewed threat of invasion, workmen were busy during the late spring and summer of 1814 on a new set of fortifications designed to fill gaps in the existing network. To the relief of New Yorkers, the port’s new military engineer, Colonel Joseph Swift—the first man to graduate from West Point—proved as capable as his mentor, Jonathan Williams. Ranging across the city’s shores and hinterland, Swift plotted out a ring of new outposts. Gun batteries were placed on the Long Island shore and an offshore reef facing the Staten Island forts, thereby strengthening the Narrows. A two-story wooden blockhouse, with cannon above and loopholes for muskets below, was built and garrisoned at Rockaway to deter the foe from landing on the barrier beaches of Jamaica Bay. Remembering well the lessons of 1776, Swift pressed for a series of defenses across Brooklyn and rural northern Manhattan to prevent a flanking British assault. Large blockhouses were built on Mill Rock in the East River and at Hallets Point on the Queens shore to guard the Hell Gate passage. Swift counted on the 44 guns of the frigate President, which had run the blockade into the harbor in February, to be a “floating battery” augmenting the 570 cannon and mortars of the harbor and shoreline forts.44