He surveyed the papers once quickly, determining from the identical hand in which they were written that they were not original documents, but copies prepared for him: reports on the locations and state of readiness of their vessels, the existing disposition of the harbor defenses, the stocks and value of materiel laid up in the armories, and the cost of bringing them up to anything like a war footing. The great population of Americans, he realized, had no idea the expense, the sheer dollar burden, of maintaining a navy. Before the Barbary War, the largest item in the United States’ national budget was the tribute annually handed over to the Moorish pirates; now the greatest expense was maintenance of the navy. Well, if an expense had to be borne, it was surely better spent on ships and sailors that could protect our shores from all manner of foes than in bribes to brigands. But Jesus on the Throne, the sum spent on it was astonishing—and ours, he realized, is a tiny navy. How in the world did the British maintain their thousand ships, what engine of economy must be required to float such a force? The answer was self-evident: to command an empire that bestrode the entire world and its resources and, of course, to capture and enslave the seamen of other nations, to the number of a third or more of their entire strength. And if they indeed had mastered the world, what chance did a small, freedom-loving country, which had no desire or design for empire, have to oppose them?
First at the top of the pile was Commodore Rodgers’s recommendation for an overall strategy, which as he read he realized was the same plan that was imparted to him at Washington City and had started into effect: to assemble one respectable battle squadron at New York, perhaps four frigates and two brigs or sloops, to meet the threat of the most likely first squadron that the British could be expected to deploy against them. Then, when there was opportunity, to carry the operation to England’s own shores, disrupt their commerce, capture prizes, and be gone before an overwhelming battle fleet could assemble. The remaining few frigates and smaller vessels would be dispatched to operate independently, according to their commanders’ best instincts, to capture merchant prizes and make the conflict uncomfortably expensive for the British merchant class, and to battle and one hoped capture several of the swarm of smaller British warships that were ubiquitous upon the seas.
Bliven considered it. In important ways it made sense. America’s swift, stout forty-fours could best any English frigate of their class and outrun any battle-line ship that might come against them. It was audacious but risky, for it left the home coast disastrously underdefended and subject to blockade at the English whim. He smiled wryly at Rodgers’s conclusion:
Permit me, Sir, to say, that in the event of a war it would be particularly gratifying to me to command such a squadron as I have mentioned. I may with propriety pledge myself to make that arrogant nation feel its effects to the very quick, to have such an opportunity, as I have mentioned, of affording them a more bitter subject for their still more bitter & illiberal animadversions.
Of course, what else would Rodgers do than nominate himself to command our one real squadron? Personal glory was not incompatible with the national defense, and Rodgers was a capable and experienced commander, as he had proved in the Mediterranean. Yet, an overwhelming British response was certain, though it would not come quickly. When an English fleet materialized off Boston, or New York, or the Chesapeake, a sea of sail as far as the eye could see, carrying not just enormous guns but the troops of an army of occupation, what then? Rodgers’s scheme entrusted defense of the harbors to the hundred and seventy gunboats whose construction had been the largest naval expenditure for the past several years. The sheer number of them gave one pause and presented the illusion of providing safety, yet the American Navy had shown at Tripoli that gunboats were all but hopeless in opposing real warships. Only once that Bliven could recall in recent history had gunboats mounted an effective defense.
Immediately below Rodgers’s recommendation lay a similar report from Stephen Decatur, himself now raised to commodore, submitted in answer to the same interrogatories posed to Rodgers, and which disagreed with Rodgers on almost every fundamental principal. To Decatur, the entire navy, all seventeen ships, should be dispersed for independent operation, striking opportunistically, but most staying close enough to provide some measure of safety from any transitory British marauding of coastal towns. To Decatur this seemed the greater threat, in the near term, than the assembling of a massive strike force that would come in time.
It was apparent that Rodgers and Decatur had responded to the same questions independently, each not knowing how the other had declared. Now, how might he write his own recommendation without taking sides and necessarily alienating one or the other?
“Dearest, what are you reading?” Clarity was out of bed and on her way over to the desk even as she arranged the nightgown around her. Without asking, she lifted the top few sheets from the stack and began reading, her face not registering concern at their gravity, but indeed something like relief.
“The Navy let me stay home for a time longer, my love, but not without obligation to work at papers.”
Her posture relaxed. “Oh, Bliv, I was afraid that your curiosity had gotten the better of you and you had decided to read a sample of my book. That would never do.” On the other side of her desk she saw the loose binder of her manuscript, its ribbon undisturbed.
He stood, wrapped her in his arms, and kissed her. “And good morning to you, too.”
Softly she banged her forehead against his chest. “Dearest, I am so sorry, I was not awake yet.”
“Then let me bring you some coffee.” He released her and passed into the keeping room to fetch it.
He returned to find her back in bed, sitting up, and gave her the steaming cup. “Thank you, dearest. You know, since we both have our work to do, perhaps we could find you a place where you can apply yourself to it undisturbed.”
He sat by her quietly for a moment, holding her hand, assimilating that this was one of those moments when they must understand each other as much by what they did not say as by the words that did pass between them. He recognized the ferocity with which she meant to protect her privacy, and appreciated her diplomacy in expressing it as a matter not of her privacy but his. And Clarity appreciated, once she spoke, that he accepted the characterization of her novel as her work, and not some hobby or affectation. “Well,” he said at last, “there is my old room upstairs. I could use that as a study.”
“Yes.” He felt her enthusiasm rise. “My father had a slant-top desk that is now sitting disused; it is not too large to move upstairs. I am having tea with my mother today. Shall I ask her if we may have it?”
“Certainly. And while you’re about it, that property she owns out at the pond where your father took me hunting has some dead trees on it. I would like to take Freddy out and cut one down, if they haven’t all been poached already. Firewood is going to get very expensive before spring comes.”
“Oh, she won’t care. I’ll just tell her I told you to go ahead. You might divert some to her for the favor.”
“Done and done.” He kissed her hand. “It is a pleasure doing business with you.”
That Sunday Fred drove Bliven and Clarity to church. Old Putnam proclaimed himself not feeling up to leaving the house, and Dorothea stayed home to tend him. This explanation was accepted, for it politely avoided the necessity of declaring their antipathy toward Reverend Beecher. The more that the doctrine of Unitarianism spread outward from Boston, the more Beecher railed and thundered against it, and Bliven’s mother declined to conceal her opinion that she found its precepts sound and sensible. She felt still less inclined to silence after it was told her that Beecher once laid her heresy to the weakness of her sex, and that she needed the guidance of a learned man. This Sunday, however, the sermon was on his other staple, the need for the abolition of slavery, which always found Clarity’s ready approbation.
As they left church, Beecher took Bliven by t
he hand at the door and held fast, which was unusual. Bliven tried not to study his features at close quarters, for the years seemed to have started melting the wax of his face, turning down the corners of his mouth even more, and, seen from the wrong angle, his eyes seemed to be sliding off sideways. “Well, then, Master Commandant Putnam. From following the newspapers, one suspects that one day soon you are again to carry our country’s honor out upon the oceans.”
“Yes, sir, it would seem likely.”
“And you are to have your own command now, one hears.”
“Yes, sir, that is true.”
Beecher finally released him. “I hope you will forgive my familiarity, but I brought you a little something to take with you.” He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and produced an awkwardly sized dark brown binding, too small to be a book, too large for a tract or pamphlet. “Some few years ago I had occasion to preach a closely reasoned sermon against the practice of dueling. Despite my natural modesty and disinclination to do so, many persons remonstrated with me to allow it to be printed for distribution. As I was mindful of that, well, singularly unfortunate experience of yours last year in the West Indies—”
Bliven stiffened.
“—I would like to give this to you. If you read it carefully you will find yourself logically and spiritually prepared to dissuade any under your command who feel inclined to again indulge in that hellish practice.”
Bliven accepted it and allowed Beecher to shake his hand again. “Thank you, Reverend. I shall indeed read it, and should I find any of my officers or men engaged in a duel, let me assure you that I will make them very familiar with its precepts.” He smiled. “Before I have them flogged.”
Clarity took Bliven’s arm as they walked toward their carriage. “Have them flogged? Tell me,” she said, “somewhere in my letterbox, I have the most earnest missive from a callow young lieutenant decrying the violence with which captains rule their crews. Do you recall him? I was wondering what became of him.”
Bliven placed his hand on hers as he nodded to acknowledge the other churchgoers who nodded to them. “He grew up, I imagine. He acquired responsibility. He came to realize what kind of men often join the Navy. He learned that he would be held responsible for their behavior.”
Fred had waited in the carriage, for he was not a churchgoer and minded not who knew. Barely out of the churchyard, Clarity observed Bliven reading the pamphlet that Beecher had given him, and she leaned across his shoulder to observe. “How do you find his little book?”
Bliven flipped to the end. “Sixty pages of close-set type; allowing three handwritten pages for each, is one hundred and eighty pages in hand. I would judge that about average for one of his sermons.”
She shrugged and looked away. “Pooh. He’s not that bad.”
“Ha! Well, in truth, I do not disagree with anything I see to denounce dueling, he is just so almighty long-winded about it.”
Her smile was so patronizing that Bliven leapt to his feet in the carriage and turned, facing her, steadying himself by bracing his butt against Fred’s back. Holding Beecher’s book in his right hand, he read, loud, in a declamatory voice while gesturing with his left hand, mimicking Beecher’s oratorical flourishes.
Civil government is a divine ordinance. The particular form is left to the discretion of men, but the character of rulers God has himself prescribed. They must be just men. Such as fear God—a terror to evil doers, and a praise to them that do well. Do duelists answer this description? Are they just men? Do they fear God? Look at their law. It constitutes the party, judge in his own cause, and executor of his own sentence. Its precepts, like those of Draco, are written in blood. Death, or exposure to it, is its lightest punishment, perhaps upon the innocent as upon the guilty!
“Oh, very well,” Clarity sighed. “Perhaps he is that bad.” A carriage in the lane passed in the opposite direction, whose staring occupants Clarity acknowledged with a smile and nod as though nothing unusual was transpiring.
Bliven plopped next to her, rocking the carriage briefly back and forth. “Sixty pages of this! My God Almighty, if I had to listen to all of it I’d shoot him myself.”
Clarity laughed despite herself. “Thou shalt not forswear thyself.”
“A worthy commandment, but it does not apply to sailors.”
4
For the Commodore’s Eyes Only
What a queer feeling it was for Bliven to rediscover the attic bedroom of his youth, where he had lain in bed with borrowed books, dreaming what the rest of the world might be like, the room he had shared with Sam Bandy during his visit after the Barbary War—Bandy, who was now enslaved as a pressed sailor on a British vessel somewhere off their Atlantic shore, a thought that made him sick at his stomach. Sam might not be far distant; British cruisers maintained their posts for months at a time, like wolves patrolling their marked hunting circuits. If the United States could launch this war, spring their surprise, and conclude it swiftly, the repatriation of captured sailors must be part of the treaty. But if it dragged on, if Sam were on a ship that was transferred to the Indian Ocean, or Australia, his imprisonment might extend to years.
Bliven also felt keenly the spur of personal motivation. He was a United States naval officer. He wore the uniform and accepted the token retainer of pay, and the Navy needed no greater claim on him than that, to receive his best efforts at his duty. But his knowing that Sam was taken, and that he must be somewhere suffering, added such an incalculable personal animus that he knew he would, himself, have been at war even if the country were not.
Closed off from the rest of the house and with no fireplace, his old bedroom was fiercely cold, but he remembered a lesson from the Enterprise, of the heated shot in the bucket of sand. On the floor by his desk he deposited a shallow box which he filled with stream pebbles, there being no sand nearby. The first time he placed a quantity of live coals from the keeping room’s fireplace in a small old iron kettle and set it on the tray of pebbles, he was satisfied to judge that it worked at least as well as the hot cannonball—actually better, for both the kettle and the pebbles absorbed and retained the heat better than sand.
The stairs up to his bedroom were steep and narrow, not just because that was the New England custom, but because it was dictated by the dimensions of their hall. When Fred Meriden brought up the wagon with old Mr. Marsh’s writing desk well padded in its bed, it would have proven difficult to maneuver upstairs, had not its long, elegant ball-footed legs made it possible to carry up with half of it hanging outside the banister.
It was a well-made piece, of walnut, its slant top folding down to provide a spacious writing surface and reveal compartments within for the segregation of different manner of papers. Marsh had pasted small paper tags at their openings to indicate the papers of which of his many enterprises were folded into each. Bliven knew when he began courting Clarity that her family was comfortably situated, but he’d had no sense of the diversity of their wealth, extending, not uncommonly for New Englanders of their class, into speculation in western lands and into shipping. It was impossible not to wonder whether, had he lived, her father would have supported the coming war and its cost to American commerce or whether he would have joined with the great majority of his fellow magnates in regarding the forced capture of American seamen a regrettable cost of doing business. Perhaps, Bliven thought, it was fortunate that he would never know.
Left alone at last to his packet of documents, his first thought was not of naval defense but, surprisingly, of his future here, on the farm. He regarded the comfortable but common bed of his boyhood and the other solid, yeomanlike furniture of his youth, contrasted now with the elegant walnut writing desk, the fine utensils, and realized that he was suddenly closeted with his past, his present, and his future all at once. He had been a farm boy, was now a naval officer, and apparently one day must be a gentleman of society. He realized that he and Clarity h
ad not discussed where they would live when her mother and his parents were gone.
He might safely guess from the amount of time Clarity still spent with her mother that she missed her former luxuries. When her mother finally died, to dismiss the servants and sell the great house would be impossible to ask. Yet he was no less fond of his life and its virtues, closer to the land. Perhaps there would be no need to choose, or perhaps as he did now he must endlessly choose, but they must navigate that discussion one day.
Over the following weeks he learned his packet of documents intimately. He undertook subscriptions to the newspapers in Boston, New Haven, and Hartford, each issue perused for political and naval news and shared with his family before depositing them in what they still called Captain Bull’s Tavern for the enjoyment of its patrons. He corresponded regularly with Hull and occasionally with Barron, to learn the latest of what the Navy knew of British strengths in its different anchorages, and of America’s own preparedness. This last was an easy matter to assimilate: what the Navy could do to maintain and supply its ships, it did do faithfully. That which required heavy expenditures of money—repairs to the New York, the Boston, and the Adams, and the conversion and fitting out of new vessels, including his own Tempest in Charleston, as he was dismayed to discover—was regularly deferred until Congress should make the money available.
The Tempest--Commander Putnam and Mr. Madison's War Page 9