Decision at Sea
Page 10
Of course, whatever Perry might say officially, everyone in the fleet had witnessed the conduct of the Niagara under Elliott’s command. Even while the battle was being fought, the men on the Lawrence were muttering about it to themselves and to each other. Wounded men brought down into the cockpit of the Lawrence complained bitterly, even as the surgeon bound their wounds, that the Niagara was deliberately staying out of the battle, leaving the Lawrence to bear the full burden of the fight unsupported. Afterward, talk inevitably spread: first inside the fleet, and then in the towns and forts ringing the lake, and eventually in the public press. Perry told his friends to stop it. He believed that public controversy would sully the American victory. “Honor enough had been gained,” he insisted. And perhaps the controversy would have died in whispered rumors if Elliott himself had not insisted on bringing it up.79
Elliott heard the continued mutterings and found them intolerable. Having once been the hero of Lake Erie himself, he could not bear that this sobriquet was now being applied to Perry and that, in practically the same breath, his own conduct was found wanting. His reaction was to become defensive and to blame the rumors on Perry’s refusal to give him the credit he deserved. He was angered further when Congress promoted Perry to captain with his commission backdated to September 10, 1813, while Elliott’s reward was merely to assume command of the squadron on Lake Erie—where, of course, there was no longer an enemy for him to fight. One factor in Elliott’s resentment may have been that while Elliott himself had started his career late and scratched his way to official notice, Perry, the captain’s son, had benefited from family influence. Eventually Elliott came to believe that he should get at least equal credit for the victory, and he argued selfishly that the officers and men of the Lawrence should not share in the prize money because, after all, the Lawrence had struck its flag. On at least one occasion, Elliott went so far as to declare that it would have been better if the British had won, just to prove that Perry did not deserve the victory.80
Lieutenant William B. Shubrick warned Elliott in a friendly way that Perry held Elliott’s reputation in his hands, and “the least you and your friends can say . . . the better for you.” It was good advice, but it elicited the opposite reaction. Instead of remaining quiet and being grateful for Perry’s restraint, Elliott wrote Perry a challenging letter. “The wrongs I have suffered are many,” Elliott wrote, thus setting a tone of wounded victim. “I am at a loss to know how it was possible you could have made such representations.” Elliott all but ordered Perry to stop making “base, false, and malicious reports,” especially “in the society of the ladies or that of young navy officers.”81
It was now clear to Perry that since Elliott was going to make the issue public anyway, it was time to have it out. He prepared eleven specific charges against Elliott and submitted them to the navy secretary for a court-martial. He also wrote to Elliott to inform him of the charges, addressing him in language that seemed calculated to provoke a duel, calling Elliott “impudent as well as base” and referring to his “unmanly conduct” during the battle. Stung by Perry’s letter, Elliott did challenge Perry to a duel, but Perry scornfully rejected it because, he said, Elliott was no gentleman.82
After the victory on Lake Erie, Congress ordered that medals be struck to honor both Perry and his second in command, Master Commandant Jesse Duncan Elliott, whose medal is shown here. Jealous that Perry received most of the public credit for the victory, Elliott began a campaign to elevate himself and discredit his senior. (U.S. Navy)
It never came to a duel, nor to a court-martial. James Monroe, who succeeded Madison in the White House, wanted no airing of the Navy’s dirty laundry at such a time, and the court-martial charges were simply filed away without action.* The bickering over the prize money continued a while longer. Eventually Congress approved the sum of $260,000, which was divided up in the traditional way, with the greatest portions going to those at the top.† Accordingly, the largest amount went to the overall theater commander, Isaac Chauncey at Sackett’s Harbor, who never came within two hundred miles of the battle, but who nevertheless got $12,750. Perry and Elliott got $7,140 each. The other officers throughout the fleet each received between $1,214 and $2,295, and the individual sailors (including the militia volunteers) got $214.89, paltry by comparison, but a substantial sum in 1818.83
After the war was over, Perry got command of a frigate, the brand-new forty-four-gun Java, named in honor of Old Ironsides’ second great victory, and he took her on a Mediterranean cruise in 1816–17. Two years later, during a diplomatic expedition up the Orinoco River in Venezuela, he caught yellow fever, and after battling the disease for a week, he died on his thirty-fourth birthday. Perry’s youngest brother, Alex, who had survived the battle on Lake Erie unscathed, died three years later, at the age of twenty-two, while trying to save the life of a drowning sailor.
Elliott lived for another quarter century, but he remained a “stormy petrel.”84 In 1820 he played a key role in provoking a duel between James Barron (of the Chesapeake-Leopard affair) and Stephen Decatur (who had supported Perry in the feud with Elliott). The origin of the duel was a stupid quarrel that probably would have been settled amicably but for Elliott’s poisonous influence. As it was, both men fell wounded, Decatur mortally so. Perry and Decatur were the two most distinguished public heroes of the War of 1812, and Decatur’s death only one year after Perry’s left a great void in Navy leadership. As for Elliott, he disgracefully fled the scene of the duel rather than stay by the wounded Barron. In spite of that, Elliott was later promoted to captain, and eventually he commanded both the West Indies Squadron (1829–32) and the Mediterranean Squadron (1835–38).
The Treaty of Ghent, which brought an end to the war in 1815, essentially restored the status quo between the United States and Britain without resolving most of the issues that had led to war in the first place. The British continued to insist that they had the right to impress British-born sailors from American ships at sea, although since the war in Europe had ended with Napoleon’s defeat, they gave up the practice of doing so. Likewise, the British did not accept America’s broad definition of neutral rights, but once again the return of peace to Europe meant that America no longer occupied its precarious neutrality, making the issue moot.
On one issue, however, there was a clear resolution. Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, which made possible Harrison’s victory at the Battle of the Thames, convinced the British to drop their demand for an independent Indian federation in the Northwest. The way was clear for the westward expansion of the United States.
Eighty years after the Battle of Lake Erie, a young American historian named Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in which he argued that the presence of a proximate frontier played a decisive role in defining America’s culture, values, and character. Though Turner had (and still has) his critics, it is self-evident that the conquest, settlement, and defense of the frontier were critical in American history. But the mastery of the frontier was due not only to pioneers in buckskin or stalwart settlers carving farms out of the wilderness; it was possible in the first place because of the victory of Oliver Hazard Perry’s small naval squadron over its British counterpart on September 10, 1813. With only fifteen vessels involved, most of them small gunboats, it was not a large engagement, but it had enormous strategic significance. An entire British squadron was captured intact; the command of Lake Erie shifted in one day—indeed, in a single maneuver—from Britain to America, and when it did, the momentum in the war for the Northwest changed as well. For the United States, the Battle of Lake Erie was a Lilliputian Trafalgar fought on fresh water, with consequences every bit as profound for America’s future as Trafalgar was for Britain’s survival. Perry’s victory secured the northwestern frontier for the United States.
Moreover, the Battle of Lake Erie marked the pinnacle, for Americans at least, of a type of naval warfare that had been evolving for most of two centuries. Perry
won the Battle of Lake Erie with wooden-hulled, square-rigged sailing vessels that would have been familiar to Sir Francis Drake or even Christopher Columbus. Perry and his men maneuvered their craft by manipulating a complex network of lines and sails, and they fought by working smooth-bore muzzle-loading iron guns that had to be manhandled about the deck by brute force. The men who served them required relatively little expertise. Both Perry and Barclay fought with almost as many soldiers as sailors on board their vessels, yet their men fought valiantly and stubbornly. For their part, the officers adhered to a professional culture that was centuries old and which was dominated by a code of behavior in which public honor was at least as important as private conduct. And yet, in terms of both technology and culture, the Battle of Lake Erie was a template of naval combat that was already passing. Six years earlier, Robert Fulton had successfully tested a steam-powered vessel on the Hudson River.
[PART TWO]
IRON, STEAM, AND NATIONAL UNION
The Battle of Hampton Roads March 8–9, 1862
IF THE MASTERY OF THE FRONTIER WAS THE NATION’S FIRST GREAT challenge, the second, and arguably its most traumatic, was the need to resolve the question of its own character as a democratic republic. Westward expansion eventually forced the nation’s leaders to confront the question of whether slavery, too, should be allowed to expand. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had banned slavery from the territory that was later secured by Perry’s victory in 1813, and consequently both Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) came into the Union as free states. But both Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) entered as slave states. In 1819, the year Perry died of yellow fever, the territory of Missouri applied for admission. Since there were already several thousand black slaves working the rich bottomlands of the Missouri River, it naturally sought admission as a slave state. During the congressional debate, however, Representative James Talmadge of New York rose to offer an amendment that would make slavery illegal in Missouri as a condition of its admission. Southerners were first horrified, then outraged. Despite the small number of slaves in Missouri, the stakes were enormous because the passage of Talmadge’s amendment would establish the precedent that Congress could restrict the growth of slavery in the American West.
The abolition of slavery was never the central issue in this dispute. Rather, what split the country in half was an argument over the expansion of slavery into the West. If slavery could not expand, southerners believed, it could not survive. Without new lands to bring under cultivation, the natural increase of the slave population would eventually create a society where there were more slaves than there was work for them to do. The price of slaves would plummet; their idleness would provoke an intolerable social crisis. The South therefore insisted that slavery must be allowed to spread: first into the western territories beyond the Mississippi River, and eventually southward as well, as the United States acquired part of Mexico and some of the islands of the Caribbean. A majority in the North insisted just as strongly that slavery should be restricted to the states where it already existed.
Over the next four decades, this argument was marked by occasional agreements and compromises (one of which allowed Missouri to become a slave state in 1821), but it was never resolved. Worse, from the southern point of view, the growth of northern political power seemed to foreshadow a time when the South would be unable to control, or even influence, the debate. In 1812 the War Hawks of the South and West had held the balance of political power in America, but by midcentury that power had shifted to the North and the Northwest. When in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president—without a single vote from the deep South—on a platform of preventing slavery from expanding at all, southerners could read the writing on the wall. Without waiting to see what policies this new president might adopt, seven southern states took the extraordinary step of seceding from the Union to form their own confederation.
The ensuing Civil War changed the nation. In part this was due to the triumph of Lincoln’s vision of permanent union over the southern concept of state sovereignty. But in part, too, it was a product of the war itself. Each side fielded armies of up to a hundred thousand men—more than thirty times larger than Harrison’s army at the Battle of the Thames—and those armies had to be organized, transported, supplied, and fed. Before the war was over, more than three and a half million men would serve in uniform on one side or the other. Meeting the demands of such a large-scale war required the full capacity of a unified nation with a complex and integrated bureaucracy. Whatever its theoretical commitment to state sovereignty, the Confederacy as well as the Union had to deal with this reality, and both sides did so by imposing conscription and martial law on the states. It is one of the many ironies of history that the South’s decision to secede and fight a war of independence generated far more sweeping changes in southern society and culture and was far more destructive of “State rights” than would have been the case if southerners had simply acquiesced to Lincoln’s election.
Eventual Union success in the Civil War was due primarily to the sacrifices of the soldiers on the ground, who bore the brunt of battle and gave their lives profligately in the conviction that the Union was worth dying for, as well as to the administration that sustained them through four years of war. But the Union war effort was aided significantly by northern naval superiority, which was nowhere showcased more poignantly than in the timely arrival in Hampton Roads, Virginia, of the USS Monitor on the night of March 8, 1862, literally in the nick of time to neutralize the offensive potential of the Confederate ironclad Virginia.
THE DARK, SQUAT OBJECT that crept menacingly out of the Elizabeth River early on the morning of March 8, 1862, looked nothing at all like the elegant vessels of Perry’s or Barclay’s squadrons on Lake Erie. For one thing, the Confederate States Ship Virginia boasted no masts or spars, nor sails of any kind. The black smoke emerging from its single stack amidships marked it as a steam-powered vessel. Somewhere deep inside that dark hull, coal-fed fires transformed water into steam, which drove pistons that turned a crankshaft attached to a seventeen-foot bronze propeller. The only visible evidence of all this internal activity, besides the black smoke, was the roiling brown water astern, a V-shaped wake that spread slowly across the placid surface of the roadstead. To add to the menacing, even sinister aspect of this grotesque craft, its entire superstructure was coated with iron plate, four inches of it, bolted on top of nearly two feet of oak and pine, the rounded heads of the bolts giving its skin a knobby appearance.
For all that, the most ominous aspect of this odd craft was that not a single human figure was in sight. No sailor clung to the absent rigging; no officer walked its weather deck; if there were men, stripped to the waist, hunching over its guns and ready for combat, they were not visible from the outside. Indeed, to those observing it for the first time—including more than 250 U.S. Navy officers and men who would perish at its hands that day—this object seemed hardly a vessel at all, and as if in testimony to that, the quartermaster on one of the Union warships in the roadstead announced its appearance by declaring, “That thing is a-comin’ down.” One Union officer likened it to a creature: “The water hisses & boils with indignation as like some huge slimy reptile she slowly emerges from her loathsome lair.” But to most of the hundreds of observers watching from the shoreline, this smoke-belching, iron-plated “thing” was neither vessel nor creature but a machine: a giant, self-propelled, armored engine of war.1
Inside that engine of war, directing its movements, was sixty-one-year-old Franklin Buchanan, who had been a naval officer for most of his life. Buchanan had joined the Navy in the last days of the War of 1812, and his first sea service had been as a midshipman on board the frigate Java, where his commanding officer and first role model had been Oliver Hazard Perry. By 1862 Buchanan had accumulated nearly fifty years of active naval service, including a role as the founding superintendent of the Naval Academy at Annapolis (where the superintendent’s house is named for him) and a tour as th
e flag captain under Matthew C. Perry (Oliver’s brother) during that officer’s mission to open Japan to Western trade in 1853–54.2
As a Marylander, Buchanan had been horrified by the outbreak of hostilities, and he had resigned his commission in the conviction that his own state would soon secede and join the Confederacy. But Maryland did not secede, and almost at once Buchanan regretted his decision. Somewhat sheepishly, he tried to recall his resignation. The Union secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, would have none of it and responded curtly: “By direction of the president, your name has been stricken from the rolls of the Navy.”3 Angry at such cavalier treatment (as he saw it), Buchanan retired to his country estate on Maryland’s eastern shore, where he nursed his anger and disappointment for two more months, growing more truculent by the day at what he considered the Lincoln administration’s highhanded behavior. In the end he decided that he could not remain idle while others fought the great war of his generation. In July, only days after the Confederate victory at Bull Run, he left his Maryland home and made his way surreptitiously across the James River to Virginia to offer his services to the Confederacy.
The Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, chose Buchanan to command the Virginia because he believed the Marylander had the perfect combination of realism and boldness. “The Virginia is a novelty,” Mallory wrote in his letter of appointment. It “is untried, and its powers unknown, and the Department does not give specific orders as to her attack on the enemy.” But Mallory also made it clear that he hoped for great things from this experimental vessel and that he expected Buchanan to seize the initiative. “Action—prompt and successful action—now could be of serious importance to our cause,” Mallory wrote. If Mallory wanted action, Buchanan was just the man for the job. One of the Virginia’s officers, after hearing Buchanan’s initial address to the crew, described him as “a typical product of the old-time quarterdeck, as indomitably courageous as Nelson, and just as arbitrary.”4