Perry’s trip from Black Rock to Erie illuminated the difficulties that he would encounter in trying to build a war fleet on the banks of a frontier lake. The few roads that existed were all but impassable, rutted and soggy with melting snow. He started out in a horse-drawn sleigh that was dragged over the thin sheet of ice along the southern shore of the lake. But the ice was untrustworthy in late March, and the horses occasionally broke through the crust. Eventually he had to abandon the ice and trust to the sloppy roads ashore. Finally, on March 27, his party arrived at Erie, and he got his first glimpse of the shipyard where he was to supervise the construction of an American fleet.34
Erie itself was a pleasant little town consisting of about ninety buildings clustered near Presque Isle Bay, which was formed by an arm of the land that reached out into the lake. That peninsula shielded an arrowhead-shaped body of water some two miles wide, extending nearly five miles into the forest to a picturesque waterfall whose cascade provided a constant musical backdrop. On its shores, the keels of two twenty-gun brigs had been laid, the ribs of each vessel sticking up like the bones of a skeleton. Workers were in the process of nailing thick planks onto those ribs. But Noah Brown, the New York shipbuilder who had the government contract to build the brigs, was very nearly at the end of what he could do in this wilderness shipyard without iron fittings, cordage, sails, guns, or anchors. Nor did he have the carpenters, blacksmiths, joiners, and other experts necessary to complete the detail work on the two vessels. And finally, even if somehow all these obstacles could be overcome, there were no officers or sailors to man the ships if and when they were finished. All these elements necessary to success—the materials, the skilled workers, guns, officers, and a crew—would have to be found and brought to Erie along various routes at least as tortuous as the one Perry had just traveled.
Daunting as all that was, what astonished Perry most was that the site was completely unprotected. There were no fortifications to defend the bay from a British raid, and the only cannon at the site was an old iron boat howitzer that had been found on the beach and which locals used to celebrate the Fourth of July. The only security force was provided by a half dozen civilians who had been hired to watch the ships at night. An observer who arrived a few days after Perry noted in his diary that “a Sergeant’s command . . . might destroy the whole [place] in an hour.”35
Perry tackled the security problem first. He sought out the local militia commander, David Mead, and begged him to call out his command. Mead did so, but only seven men responded. Eventually, Pennsylvania governor Simon Snyder, in response to a plea from the secretary of war, formed a provisional regiment of infantry, and soon nearly eight hundred armed men swarmed about the shipyard. They repaired the tumbledown blockhouse at the foot of the bay, and when some cannon finally arrived, they mounted them there. At times the Pennsylvania militiamen must have seemed like dubious security. Like most militiamen, the soldiers considered themselves free agents, and they chafed at the imposition of any kind of discipline. Their elected officers felt the need to be friendly with the volunteers under their “command,” which made it all but impossible for them to give unwelcome orders. The officers and men played cards together, drank together, and engaged in footraces and wrestling matches. But at least there were now enough armed men around the shipyard to prevent it from being destroyed by a “sergeant’s command.”36
Perry’s next problem was finding the guns to arm his vessels once they were completed. Cannon could not be manufactured in the wilderness; they had to be brought from the East. Assuming that guns could be found at all, they would have to be dragged by brute force over abysmal forest roads or smuggled by boat across a lake that was regularly patrolled by the British. Dobbins managed to acquire two long twelve-pounders in Black Rock, which he successfully transported to Erie in an old salt boat, sailing only at night and keeping close to the U.S. side of the lake. Perry himself traveled overland to Pittsburgh, where he secured four more guns, which had to be dragged by sledge overland. It was ruinous on the animals. One contemporary estimated that a total of thirty-two hundred horses died over the winter hauling materials from Albany to Sackett’s Harbor, to Buffalo, and finally to Erie. When Lieutenant Thomas Holdup arrived at Erie with two midshipmen and forty sailors, Perry welcomed them effusively, then ordered Holdup back to Buffalo for guns, powder, and shot. In a few days he returned with two more thirty-two-pounders and, just as vital, some sails. Carronades, the heavy, short-barreled guns that made up the bulk of Perry’s firepower, were forged in Georgetown, near Washington, DC. Other pieces of ordnance were located, acquired, and either dragged along frontier roads or smuggled by boat into Presque Isle Bay.37
Meanwhile, construction work continued on the two brigs and four small gunboats at the shipyard. Each morning teams of men went out into the forest to cut timber. Horses dragged the felled trees to the edge of the bay, where other teams cut them into planks. After that, it got more complicated, for besides Brown and Dobbins, there were few at Erie with the expertise necessary to turn a wooden shell into a living warship. On the very day he had arrived at Erie, Perry had sent an urgent dispatch to Philadelphia begging for carpenters and blacksmiths, but it would take weeks for them to arrive. And he knew that as soon as the ice melted, the British squadron would try to blockade his shipyard and make it difficult, if not impossible, to get any more guns or supplies. He knew, too, that the British were hard at work constructing a big warship of their own at their base on the Detroit River. Whoever completed their new ships first, armed them, manned them, and got them into the lake would gain an enormous advantage. There was no time to worry about making the brigs into works of art with figureheads or scrollwork. Perry insisted that good was good enough: “plain work” was what was needed. The contractor, Noah Brown, put his finger on the key issue when he noted that the ships “will be needed for one battle; if we win that is all that is wanted of them.”38
In May, Perry learned of a pending attack on Fort George, downriver from Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the river; eager for action, he left the construction work in the hands of the contractor and departed from Erie in a four-oared boat. Landing near Buffalo, he completed the journey by pony, his long legs nearly dragging on the ground as he rode. He took part in the successful attack on May 27, then busied himself recruiting sailors for his Lake Erie squadron. Returning to Erie via Black Rock, he determined to bring the five gunboats still languishing there to join his squadron at Presque Isle. It took several days to work the small craft upriver through the rapids, but finally in mid-June the last vessel cleared the rapids and Perry set sail for Erie. It was a risky journey, for at any moment the British squadron might appear over the horizon and blast his little squadron of five boats into pieces. Only later did he find out how close it was. On one occasion, a man from shore watched the British squadron disappear over the horizon in one direction just as Perry’s little flotilla hove into sight from the other direction to anchor in the same spot. Only a thick haze prevented the British from spotting the vulnerable Americans.39
Combined with the four gunboats built in Presque Isle Bay, the five boats Perry brought from Black Rock gave the Americans a total of nine vessels for their Lake Erie “fleet.”* None of them, however, carried more than four guns, and most carried only one. The two brigs were the key to everything. Without them, the Americans could not contest the British for command of the lake. Thankfully, the carpenters and blacksmiths had finally arrived from Philadelphia, and they began to put the finishing touches on the two large hulls. Upon his return to Presque Isle, Perry was delighted to discover that both brigs were now afloat and that the riggers were busy aloft. At about the same time, he learned from a British deserter that the enemy’s big ship would not be ready for at least a month. It began to appear that he might win the shipbuilding race for the control of the lake.40
Even without their new ship, the British were becoming bolder. Beginning in mid-July, the British squadron began appearing almo
st daily off Presque Isle Bay. The enemy ships came close in toward the shore, as if about to execute a landing, or they exchanged fire with the small American gunboats that dropped down the harbor to meet them. Then they sailed off again over the horizon. Unable to take the sea, Perry could only watch and wonder when they might next appear.
Perry had assumed a commodore’s privilege by giving names to the small schooners whose construction he had supervised. But the new secretary of the navy, William Jones, sent him names for the two brigs. One was to be named Niagara, and the other was to be the Lawrence in honor of James Lawrence, who had been killed in a frigate duel off Boston on June 1. In honor of the martyred Lawrence, Perry ordered all the flags of the squadron to half mast, and directed that each man was to wear a strip of black crepe around his left arm (the arm nearest the heart). Soon thereafter he ordered the preparation of a large black wool flag bearing the last words of the dying Lawrence: DONT GIVE UP THE SHIP.41
Of course, the problem of manpower still persisted. Perry sent letter after letter pleading for sailors, his frustration evident as he repeatedly expressed his “mortification.” He had fewer than 150 men with him at Erie, and he wrote Secretary Jones that he would need a minimum of 403 officers and men to fit out the vessels in his squadron. Jones replied that 500 men were on their way and should arrive shortly. But instead of 500, only 65 arrived, along with one lieutenant and three midshipmen. A week later 53 more arrived, but the total was still less than a quarter of the promised 500. The source of the discrepancy was obvious. All of the men had been sent first to Sackett’s Harbor, and Chauncey had kept most of them for his own squadron, forwarding only those he felt he could spare. As might have been expected, the few who arrived at Erie were not the pick of the litter. Perry complained to Chauncey that they were “a motley set [of] blacks, Soldiers and boys.”42
This hand-made flag of white letters sewn on black wool bore James Lawrence’s dying words. Perry flew this flag from the mainmast of the Lawrence during the Battle of Lake Erie and carried it with him when he transferred to the Niagara. (U.S. Naval Academy)
Chauncey was unapologetic. He said he would send more men “as soon as the public service will allow me to send them from this Lake.” In other words, he would send them only after his own campaign on Lake Ontario had been decided. Indeed, far from apologizing, Chauncey charged Perry with bigotry, picking up on his reference to “blacks, Soldiers and boys” and responding: “I have yet to learn that the Colour of the skin, or cut and trimmings of the coat, can affect a man’s qualifications. . . . I have nearly 50 Blacks on board of this Ship and many of them are amongst my best men.”43 Chauncey was deliberately changing the subject. Perry’s complaint was not fundamentally racial—about 10 to 15 percent of the men he had brought with him from Rhode Island were black, roughly the same percentage of blacks in the U.S. Navy. Perry’s complaint was not that Chauncey had sent him black sailors but that he had forwarded the least experienced hands.*
In fact, Chauncey’s letter struck Perry as so judgmental and censorious that Perry read it as a calculated insult. In that age of tender sensibilities, even the most carefully worded criticism threatened an officer’s public honor. After reading the letter several times, Perry decided that he could not serve under a man who could write such a letter, “in every line of which there is an insult.” He sent Secretary Jones his resignation, declaring, “I cannot serve longer under an officer who has been so totally regardless of my feelings.” Jones was new in the job, but he was used to this kind of touchiness, and he replied with a letter designed to both assuage Perry and remind him of his duty: “The indulgence of such feelings must terminate in the most serious injury to the service,” Jones wrote. “It is the duty of an Officer . . . to sacrifice all personal motives & feeling when in collision with the public good.”44
Jones knew his man. Perry swallowed his anger and got about the business of doing the “public good.” If Chauncey would not send him the men he needed, he would simply have to find them elsewhere. Perry had handbills printed asking for volunteers and circulated them among the militia forces. Aware of how much his own success depended on Perry’s, William Henry Harrison also gave Perry permission to recruit among the soldiers of his army and even to draft soldiers who had sea experience whether they volunteered or not, though Perry balked at this latter suggestion, since it sounded too much like impressment. In the end, some sixty militiamen volunteered to transfer to the Navy, and Perry convinced another sixty to sign up for a single cruise, expecting that the issue would very likely be resolved in a single cruise anyway. These volunteers gave Perry a total of just over three hundred men. He was still shorthanded, but he calculated that he had just enough to man the vessels. The men might be inexperienced, but then much of the work aboard warships in the Age of Sail involved the application of human muscle: hauling on a rope, loosing (or furling) a sail, or levering a cannon around a deck. For those things, soldiers would do almost as well as sailors, as long as there was someone to tell them which rope to haul on.
The soldiers hardly knew what they were getting into. As Richard Henry Dana wrote in his classic account Two Years Before the Mast, “There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life.” Captain George Stockton of the Pennsylvania militia would have agreed. After a few days on board, he sent Perry a note stating that he had volunteered in good faith, but that his “totle ignorance of this servis” meant that he had come on board without “the preparation nessessery.” Some of the soldiers, he wrote, were “naked for clothes . . . no money to buy sope or any article of grocery.” He wondered if it were “concistant with my duty heare” if he could “return to camp for a few days to make provisions for the soldiers.”45
Perry’s success in finding the necessary manpower created yet another problem: he now had over three hundred mouths to feed. A survey of the rations that had been forwarded from Pittsburgh showed that much of the bread supply was “mouldly & unfit for men to eat.” The beef was “putrid and covered with vermine.” Of course, shipboard rations in the Age of Sail were notoriously bad, but Perry’s squadron wasn’t even at sea yet. Nevertheless, in late August Perry had to reduce the bread ration to twelve ounces per day per man, and a week later he decreed that every other day the men would receive raw flour instead of bread. All this must have made Captain Stockton wonder what he had gotten himself into.46
By the end of July, Perry had a virtually complete naval squadron of two twenty-gun brigs, seven small gunboats, and two supply schooners, all of which were at last afloat, armed, and manned, even if the manpower was largely inexperienced. The two brigs were the most powerful vessels on Lake Erie, or at least they would be if he could get them into the lake, for as yet they were still inside Presque Isle Bay. Back in the spring when Dobbins had first set up shop there, Jesse Elliott had criticized the site because a shallow sand bar stretched across the mouth of the bay. While that barrier helped protect the shipyard from British raids, it also kept Perry’s ships trapped inside. Perry had been aware of this from the beginning, of course, and he had a plan to deal with it. He would float his ships across the bar by using what were called “camels.” These were specially built scows or barges deeply laden with ballast or filled with water. The filled barges were secured alongside the ship to be moved, then emptied out so that they acted like giant water wings, virtually lifting the vessel up and over the bar. In order to lighten the vessels as much as possible, however, it would be necessary to take the heavy guns off the ships first. If the British fleet showed up while the unarmed vessels were being floated over the bar, it could be disastrous.
All through July the British had appeared off Presque Isle Bay almost daily. They were there again on July 31, though they sailed away that night, and the next morning Perry directed his squadron down to the head of the bay to get ready for the tedious and labor-intensive process of crossing the bar. He positioned the small gunboats to guard the entrance, then set
his men to work. One crew sounded and marked the deepest water, while others attached block and tackle to the big guns on the Lawrence, hoisted them over the side, and lowered them gingerly into small boats, which took them to the beach. The next day the previously prepared “camels” were secured alongside the ship. Some fifty feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet deep, the barges were about half the size of the brigs themselves. They each had square holes cut in the bottom and were virtually submerged, with only their gunwales showing. Sailors maneuvered them along each side of the Lawrence and then ran long, heavy beams through the sweep ports of the Lawrence to rest atop the thwarts of the scows. Once everything was in place, the sailors plugged the holes in the bottom of the camels and began pumping out the water. Slowly, inch by inch, the Lawrence rose out of the water.47
But not enough. The crew on the Lawrence gently coaxed it forward over the bar until, halfway across, it suddenly lurched to a stop, aground in just over six feet of water. Somehow more weight had to be removed. Working all night, the men hoisted out the rest of the ship’s guns, took off the cables and anchors, and even lowered the spars and topgallant yards and sent them all to the beach. Then the entire process was repeated, this time with the support beams resting on large blocks of wood that were set atop the camels to give the brig more clearance over the shoal. Again the Lawrence rose from the water; foot by foot it eased forward. Finally, just after dawn on August 4, it came safely to anchor in deep water. The barges were submerged again, and the whole process was repeated with the Niagara. It went more quickly the second time. By 11:00 A.M. the Niagara, too, was across the bar.48
Decision at Sea Page 7