Graves lost his job. His command of the American station had always been a temporary one, though he might have kept it had he won a victory. Instead the arrival of Rear Admiral the Hon. Robert Digby ended his short tenure, and Graves was ordered to Jamaica to serve under Vice Admiral Sir Peter Parker. Whether or not this was meant as a chastisement, Graves took it as one. “I must beg to state to the their lordships in my own behalf,” he wrote, “that being superceded [sic] by a junior officer, and sent to another station where I can only be second and possibly third in command . . . imply’s [sic] such a disapprobation of my conduct as will certainly discredit me.” It was characteristic of his generation and his station in society to express as much concern about how his transfer would affect his reputation as he did about the loss of Cornwallis’s army. After all, he seemed to ask, what was his crime? He had followed the rules precisely. In responding to Hood’s subsequent criticism of his conduct of the battle, he replied, “My aim was to get close, to form parallel, and attack together.” Wasn’t that precisely what a fleet commander was supposed to do?12
If Graves had played by the rules, de Grasse had bent them: first in virtually abandoning the West Indies to bring his entire fleet to Chesapeake Bay, second by going out to meet the British challenge rather than trying to defend the bay, and finally by discarding the hoary rules of combat to improvise when necessary. Then, too, while Graves and Hood had bickered over whose fault it was that de Grasse had got away, de Grasse and his subordinates engaged in a genuine exchange of ideas about how best to react to the British challenge. A quarter century later Lord Nelson would emphasize the importance of command cooperation, and he christened his subordinate captains “a band of brothers.” In the Battle of the Capes, it was the French high command, and not the British, that behaved in accordance with this new concept of cooperative command.
For the French and the British, the Battle of the Capes was simply one more fleet engagement in a long list of such encounters. But for the Americans it was epochal. Though it was part of a complex global strategy involving naval and land forces separated by thousands of miles, in the end Graves’s failure to drive de Grasse from the Virginia Capes was the proximate cause of Cornwallis’s capitulation, the event that led directly to American independence. In London, George III wanted to continue the fight for his North American colonies, but his prime minister, Lord North, knew better. He knew that after this disaster, the country would not sustain a continued war. When he heard that Cornwallis had surrendered, he cried out, “Oh God! It is all over.”
For the United States, however, it was only the beginning.
[PART ONE]
WOODEN WARSHIPS AND THE WESTERN FRONTIER
The Battle of Lake Erie September 10, 1813
LAKE ERIE IS THE SOUTHERNMOST OF THE FIVE GREAT LAKES. At its western end it is fed by the Detroit River, which carries the discharge from the three largest of those lakes (Superior, Michigan, and Huron), and at its eastern end it is drained by the Niagara River, which spills spectacularly into Lake Ontario. Along its southern shore, connected today by the asphalt ribbon of Interstate 90, is a string of cities historically associated with the coal-and-steel-based industry of the late nineteenth century: Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit. Modern Americans are likely to conceive of this region as the “rust belt,” an area where the “old economy” flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where brick chimneys spilled black smoke into the sky, and where endless trains of boxcars and flatcars carried the products from a hundred factories to the world’s consumers. Given that, it is difficult to envision Lake Erie the way Americans did in the early nineteenth century: as a distant frontier of dense forests and untracked wilderness, a body of water whose shores were largely unpopulated if not in some areas virtually unexplored. The town of Erie was a tiny frontier settlement on Presque Isle Bay, Cleveland had fewer than a hundred residents, and Detroit was Fort Detroit, a garrisoned western outpost for trappers and traders. In 1813 Lake Erie represented not the East but the West, and it was the key to the great western empire granted to the United States by the British in the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
That treaty had been a diplomatic coup for the United States. Not only did it acknowledge the United States to be “free, sovereign, and independent,” it also established the national boundaries of the new country as extending “to the river Mississippi,” thus granting to the new nation a western empire beyond the hopes of all but the most optimistic. Of particular interest was the area west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River, a region called simply “the Northwest,” an area that would eventually encompass the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. The treaty called for British troops to be evacuated “with all convenient speed” from this territory, but the British seemed to find any speed inconvenient. This infuriated Americans, who had always suspected that the British government intended to keep them hemmed in along the coastline. One of the charges that Americans had leveled against George III in the Declaration of Independence was that he had encouraged “the merciless Indian savages” to attack American settlements on the western frontier. If that was not literally true, it was certainly true that the British hoped to limit American expansion in the West even after independence, and they sought to achieve this goal by encouraging the aspirations of the native tribes. In some small part this may have been due to British concern for their erstwhile Indian allies, but primarily it was because the British recognized that a thriving and commercially vibrant United States would pose a threat to British mastery in the Atlantic.
Because there were so few roads in the Northwest, the lakes and waterways were crucial. Travelers from the East Coast to the western frontier generally ascended the Hudson River to Albany, then worked their way westward along the Mohawk River Valley to Lake Ontario and along its southern shore to Lake Erie, which provided communication with Ohio and Michigan Territory. The ability to move men and supplies across the western lakes determined control of not only the Northwest but also “Upper Canada”: the southernmost part of modern Ontario. In 1813 whoever controlled Lake Erie controlled the West, and with it the future course of American history. On the tenth of September in 1813, that future was decided in a battle between two small squadrons of sailing vessels on Lake Erie. It was America’s most important engagement during the Age of Sail, and if the numbers involved were relatively modest, the strategic consequences were enormous.
AT FIRST LIGHT on September 10, 1813, the two brigs and seven small gunboats that constituted the American naval squadron on Lake Erie lay quietly at anchor in the sheltered waters of Put-in-Bay in the lee of South Bass Island. As dawn spread slowly across the surface of the lake, a sailor stationed at the crosstrees of the mainmast on the flagship Lawrence peered into the gray mist to the northwest, the direction from which the enemy was most likely to approach. As the sky brightened, he noted a small irregularity that emerged from the gray curtain, and with the sun at his back he discerned the glint of sunlight off canvas. He did not wait for the image to solidify. Cupping his hand around his mouth, he shouted down to the deck below: “Sail ho!”
“Where away?” the deck officer called back.
“Off Snake Island,” came the reply. Then the sailor cried out again: “Sail ho!” Then again: “Sail ho! Six sail in sight.”1
In his cabin at the stern of the Lawrence, twenty-eight-year-old Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry was on his feet even before the deck officer could formally relay the news. He knew at once that the appearance of six sail could only mean that the British fleet was out and approaching. He rushed topside from his cabin and began issuing the commands that would get the Lawrence and the eight other vessels of his command out of the bay and into the open waters of Lake Erie, where they could meet the enemy. A single gun boomed out from the Lawrence—the prearranged signal to get under way—bo’suns’ pipes twittered, and the ship came to life. Sailors spat into their hands before gras
ping the capstan bars and leaning into them to heave up the ship’s anchor; other sailors climbed outboard of the rails to ascend the rope ladders, called ratlines, to the horizontal spars or yards, then edged out onto the footropes slung below the yards in order to loose the sails. A few of them moved gingerly, looking down as they placed their bare feet on the single strand of rope. Watching from the deck below were other “sailors” who only weeks before had been members of the militia army of General William Henry Harrison and who found themselves aboard a ship now only because of Perry’s desperate need for manpower. As the sails were sheeted home the ship began to move, almost imperceptibly at first, and the helmsman gently tested the feel of the tiller as the ship’s keel bit into the water. These activities were duplicated throughout the squadron as, one by one, the vessels of Perry’s command got under way.2
Perry had been anticipating this moment for over five months, ever since he had arrived at Presque Isle on the lake’s southern shoreline in late March with orders to oversee the completion of a squadron of warships. Now his nervous energy was evident in his body language as he paced back and forth on the small quarterdeck, glancing upward to see how the sails were drawing, peering around him at the activity within the squadron, and turning occasionally to steady his glass on the approaching enemy. The fact that the British were out and apparently determined on a fight was the good news; Perry had been seeking just such a fight ever since his squadron had been completed in late July. The bad news was that the wind was blowing from the southwest, which would give the British the weather gage. As long as the wind blew from the British toward the Americans, the British commander could decide when—or even if—to engage, and, more importantly, at what range. Both of Perry’s big ships were armed primarily with short-range carronades: stubby, short-barreled guns that were deadly at close range but useless at a distance. If the British held the weather gage, they could remain at whatever range they preferred and pick him to pieces with their long guns. Perry wanted a fight at close range, preferably at the traditional half cable’s length—about one hundred yards—from which distance he was confident that he could blast the English ships to kindling. But the contrary wind made that unlikely. Almost certainly the British commander had chosen this moment to seek battle precisely because the wind direction would allow him to dictate the character of the fight.
Perry was reluctant to surrender such an advantage without a struggle. As the vessels of his squadron straggled out of the bay in a rough line-ahead formation, he set a course to gain a westerly heading in an effort to seize the weather gage. For three hours, from seven to ten, he tried to force his square-rigged two-masted brigs into the teeth of a seven-knot breeze, tacking back and forth with a great expenditure of time and effort. The novice sailors on the Lawrence struggled mightily to brace the yards as close to the wind as the geometry of wind and sail would allow, then at Perry’s command they swung the yards around by brute force as the tiller went over and the ship heeled grudgingly onto the other tack. Forward progress was measured in feet. At times it seemed that the contrary wind was pushing the American ships sideways, and meanwhile the British ships were coming ever closer. They were easily visible from the deck now, and the surgeon’s mate on board the Lawrence was impressed by the display: “The vessels were freshly painted,” he recalled, “and with the morning sun shining upon their broadsides, and their red ensigns gently unfolding to the breeze, they made a very gallant appearance.”3
At midmorning, with the British squadron hull up and closing, Perry reluctantly conceded the weather gage to the enemy. He abandoned the idea of a fight from close range and gave the order to wear ship to put the Lawrence and the rest of the squadron on an easterly heading. It would give the British a serious, perhaps even decisive tactical advantage, and the Lawrence’s sailing master, William Taylor, was bold enough to say so. “I don’t care!” Perry shot back. “To windward or to leeward, they shall fight today!”4
Then Perry’s luck changed. The southwest wind weakened and died, and then, almost imperceptibly, it began to blow from the southeast. At once Perry countermanded the order to wear ship, and as the new breeze strengthened and the sails on the Lawrence stiffened, the American vessels settled comfortably on a northwesterly course with the wind to their backs. In that moment, the tactical advantage shifted dramatically and unpredictably from the British to the Americans. His spirits soaring, Perry ordered the battle flag that he had prepared raised to main truck of the Lawrence. It was a large black square on which a sailor’s widow had stitched white block letters to form the words DONT GIVE UP THE SHIP. Every man on board knew that this was more than command guidance. They were the dying words of James Lawrence, captain of the ill-fated American frigate Chesapeake, who had been mortally wounded in a duel with the British frigate Shannon on the first of June, and in whose honor Perry’s flagship had been named. Perry no doubt meant the flag to be an inspiration as well as an injunction, and when it broke at the top of the mast and could be read, it elicited a rousing cheer from the crew. If nothing else, the flag was a symbol of Perry’s determination to bring things to a decisive conclusion. Perry knew that in the next few hours the men on board the two squadrons now swiftly closing on each other would decide the control of Lake Erie and with it the outcome of the campaign for mastery of the American Northwest.5
The war that brought Perry to Lake Erie had its roots in the continuing—indeed, seemingly endless—series of wars between Britain and France that dated back to 1689. The latest chapter in this epic struggle had begun in 1793, a decade after the end of the American Revolution, and by the dawn of the new century, the armies of France were being led by an inspired and unpredictable genius named Napoleon Bonaparte. By then, the British had developed a well-worn strategy for conducting their wars against France. Counting on their continental allies to keep the French army occupied on land, the British themselves relied heavily—if not quite exclusively—on their navy: to blockade the coast of France, to harry its trade, and to seize its colonies. Only in Spain, where the future duke of Wellington fought a war of attrition and maneuver with the French occupiers, did Britain commit its soldiers to the land war.
On one hand, such a strategy took maximum advantage of Britain’s superiority at sea and minimized British casualties, but on the other hand, it was enormously expensive. To maintain a worldwide fleet of nearly a thousand warships required not only money but also manpower, and as a result, the Royal Navy had an unquenchable need for sailors, or at least for men who could be turned into sailors. To get them, Royal Navy captains fitting out ships for service were authorized to press men into service—that is, simply to take them—in whatever public place they could be found: lounging on the docks, having a pint or a smoke at the pub, even sleeping in the rented room of a boardinghouse. The press gang could not, however, enter a man’s home; that, at least, was sacrosanct. Ignorance of the maritime profession provided no security from the press gangs. Even those who had never been to sea were fair game. Rated as “landsmen” and assigned the most rudimentary tasks, they were expected simply to learn on the job. The justification for this draconian policy was the presumption that every British citizen owed service to his king whenever the security of the nation was at risk. The press was the British counterpart of the French levée en masse that secured the cannon fodder for Napoleon’s armies.
After the end of the brief Peace of Amiens in 1803, with the war already in its second decade, the pickings had become pretty scarce along the waterfront, and Royal Navy captains had to be increasingly creative to secure a crew. Royal Navy warships stopped inbound British merchant ships at the harbor’s mouth, and the men on board who had been eagerly looking forward to setting foot on shore after a long voyage instead found themselves pressed into the Royal Navy. This practice extended into the open sea as well and became so common that British merchant captains, like their French counterparts, often fled at the sight of a Royal Navy warship on the horizon. Of course, flight aroused the
suspicions of warship captains, who set out in pursuit and soon caught and stopped the slower merchant vessels. Sometimes the warship only “spoke” the vessel, with officers literally shouting across the intervening distance to discover the identity and nationality of the suspicious merchantman. But often the captain of the warship decided to send a boat for a closer inspection. When the boat bumped alongside, a Royal Navy lieutenant, generally a young man in his early twenties, would climb onto the deck and ask the skipper for his papers. Once satisfied that the vessel was not French or bound for a French port, the lieutenant might ask the captain to muster his crew. Any likely-looking sailor, particularly one with a seaman’s pigtail or tattoo, would then and there be pressed into service: taken off the merchantman and carried back to the warship to serve for the duration of the war. If the warship was seriously shorthanded, men might be pressed into service whether they had previous naval experience or not, or even if they claimed not to be British citizens.
What rankled Americans was that this practice of impressment often included American vessels. Stopping American ships at sea to check their papers was annoying enough, but when the British began conscripting able-bodied Americans off those ships, it was intolerable. The British insisted that they took only men who could be identified as British citizens, men who by their English birth owed service to their king by British law. But men who had been born in the British Isles and subsequently emigrated to America did not think of themselves as British subjects. Besides, Royal Navy captains who were desperate for manpower inevitably stretched the definition of “British subject.” Any bloke with an accent, or for that matter anyone who could not prove that he wasn’t British, was likely to be pressed into service. Eventually some ten thousand men who claimed to be Americans were pressed into service to feed the insatiable manpower demands of the Royal Navy.6
Decision at Sea Page 4