CHAPTER TWELVE
“Many nations have gone to war in pure gayety of heart; but perhaps the United States were first to force themselves into a war they dreaded, in the hope that the war itself might create the spirit they lacked.” Henry Adams’s judgment on the War of 1812—that it was an “experiment of thrusting the country into war to inflame it, as crude ore might be thrown into a furnace”—finds support in a private letter written by James Madison himself, nine months into the conflict. Recalling the war debates, the president admitted that “it had become impossible to avoid or even delay war,” even though “we were not prepared for it.” It had been necessary to take the fateful plunge because “it was certain that effective preparations would not take place, whilst the question of war was undecided.”
For a dozen years, the party in power had championed a policy of minimalism in the armed services, and the results were evident. The small clerical staffs of the War and Navy Departments were buried under mountains of paper—requisitions, warrants, appointments, promotions, and cruising orders. Weapons, uniforms, and provisions were in short supply. The army had seven thousand men enlisted in its ranks, but most were badly equipped and totally untrained. The coastline and the western frontier were unguarded. In New England, where the war was unpopular, virtually nothing was done to mobilize forces, even after the declaration of war. The best-defended American seaport was New York, where there were nine hundred men in uniform, and yet no one had much confidence that the city could withstand a determined attack. An officer told Treasury Secretary Gallatin that the New York troops were “raw & undisciplined, that no officer could risk his life & honour with them.”
America’s seagoing navy, gunboats excluded, consisted of nineteen vessels, sixteen of which were in service. Seven of the sixteen were frigates; the rest were sloops, brigs, and other unrated vessels. By comparison, the Royal Navy had more than 600 vessels in active service, with an additional 250 in port, either in process of construction or undergoing repairs. Of the British warships in service, about 175 were ships of the line, mounting at least 64 guns on two covered gun decks. Any one of these powerful vessels would overmatch the largest ship in the U.S. fleet. To be sure, the Royal Navy had global commitments, and the full brunt of British naval power would not fall all at once on the North American coast. But even the British North American Station, headquartered at Halifax, consisted of a battleship, nine frigates, and twenty-seven unrated warships. Adding the strength of nearby bases in Newfoundland, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands, the Royal Navy had four battleships, twenty-three frigates, and seventy-one unrated vessels positioned in the Americas at the outset of the War of 1812, and reinforcements would begin arriving by September.
In January 1812, after eleven years of stony silence, retired ex-Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had renewed their correspondence. Their conversation ranged across a wide terrain, only occasionally touching on politics or current affairs; in the first year alone, they devoted more space to the theology of the American Indians than to any other subject. But their early letters also happened to coincide with the war crisis, and the two aging revolutionaries could hardly avoid the subject. Adams could not resist taking the Republicans to task for having squandered precious millions on a gigantic fleet of nearly worthless gunboats, while failing to reinforce the oceangoing navy. “I lament…the total Neglect and absolute Refusal of all maritime Protection and Defence,” he lectured Jefferson in a letter dated June 28. “Money, Mariners, and Soldiers would be at the Public Service, if only a few Frigates had been ordered to be built. Without this our Union will be a brittle China Vase, a house of Ice, or a Palace of Glass. I am, Sir, with an affectionate Respect, yours.”
The numerical superiority of the Royal Navy was demoralizing in itself, but to this was added an almost supernatural aura of invincibility. When the Evening Star in London declared that England would never yield “the proud preeminence which the blood and treasure of her sons have obtained for her among the nations, by a piece of striped bunting flying at the mastheads of a few fir-built frigates, manned by a handful of bastards and outlaws,” most Americans would have agreed with the outlook, even while resenting the insult. President Madison, his cabinet heads, and congressional leaders dreaded the specter of a crushing naval defeat in the opening weeks of the war. Influential voices had argued that the entire American fleet should be kept safe in port for the duration of the conflict. Better to keep the ships out of harm’s way, they reasoned, than to see them delivered into the hands of the enemy.
On learning of this intended strategy in February 1812, William Bainbridge felt “infinite regret and mortification.” He and a colleague, Captain Charles Stewart, happened to be in Washington at the time, and called at the Navy Office to register their objections. Secretary Paul Hamilton confirmed that the frigates, in the event of war, would probably be ordered to New York, where they would be moored near the Narrows to function as fixed batteries. Appalled, the two commanders asked for and were granted an audience at the White House. They urged Madison to send the American frigates to sea. At the end of the meeting, according to Stewart, Madison announced that he was persuaded. “It is victories we want,” said the president. “If you give us [victories] and lose your ships afterwards, they can be replaced by others.”
But how should the frigates be deployed? Near the American coast or in distant waters? Should they cruise alone, or in squadrons? Should they seek engagements with the British cruisers? Should they protect American commerce or attack enemy commerce? These questions went to the heart of naval strategy, and Secretary Hamilton, a farmer by profession, was ill-suited to decide them. In late May, Hamilton asked two senior captains—John Rodgers (commanding President, in New York) and Stephen Decatur (commanding United States, in Norfolk)—to advise the department in choosing a deployment strategy that “will enable our little navy to annoy in the utmost extent the Trade of Gt Britain while it least exposes it to the immense naval force of that Government.”
Both officers suggested that the frigates be deployed in commerce-raiding cruises far from American shores. Rodgers, apologizing for his barely intelligible handwriting, which he blamed on a lame finger, recommended that a squadron consisting of two or three of the fastest frigates in the American navy, supplemented with a sloop of war, be dispatched to cruise in the waters surrounding the British home islands. The existence of a strong squadron near Britain would, in Rodgers’s view, force the Royal Navy to divert forces away from the American coast, opening the sea-lanes for the return of merchantmen and allowing privateers to sally out of port. Not surprisingly, Rodgers nominated himself as commodore, adding that “I may with propriety pledge myself to make the commerce of that arrogant nation feel its effects to the very quick.” Decatur proposed that the frigates should be deployed singly or in pairs, laden with sufficient provisions for a long cruise, and “without giving…any specific instructions as to place of cruising, but to rely on the enterprise of the officers.” He reasoned that one or two frigates, in preference to a large squadron, would not be easily detected by the British, would cover large distances more quickly, and could attack British convoys. On the other hand, if one or two frigates were unfortunate enough to sail into the midst of a larger British squadron and be captured, “we would not have to regret the whole of our marine crushed at one blow.”
Disagreements within Madison’s cabinet added another layer of complexity to the debate. Gallatin was anxious about the fate of American merchant vessels caught at sea when war was declared. There were several hundred such vessels thought to be inbound to American ports, with an aggregate value (Gallatin estimated) of between $1 million and $1.5 million per week in the first four weeks of the war. With his eye on the bottom line, the Treasury Secretary wanted the American frigates deployed to guard the sea-lanes near the major American ports until these important assets were safely home.
Hamilton hesitated. Rodgers’s and Decatur’s letters sat on his desk for two w
eeks. In the meantime, Madison and his cabinet decided to concentrate the entire navy at New York, under the command of Commodore Rodgers, who was now, at age forty, the senior officer in active sea service. New York was chosen as the point of rendezvous because it was the most securely defended of the major seaports, it was centrally located on the coast, and it was the port to which the largest number of American merchantmen would be returning in the first weeks of the war. Decatur, with the United States, the Congress, and the brig Argus, sailed from Norfolk on June 16, reaching Sandy Hook one day after the declaration of war. Decatur and Rodgers, with President and the fine sloop of war Hornet, rendezvoused and combined forces.
Both officers were eager to sail immediately. Rodgers hoped to strike a hard blow against local British forces, “to cripple & reduce their force in detail,” before reinforcements could be deployed to the western Atlantic. The commodore had also learned that a giant convoy of enemy merchantmen, reportedly consisting of 110 sail with an aggregate value of some £12 million, was due to sail from Jamaica for England. It is fair to assume that Rodgers and every other man in the squadron was salivating at the thought of the prize money to be won in a surprise attack on this convoy. But Rodgers was still without orders from Washington, and therefore obliged to wait. The situation was exasperating.
On June 21, three days after the declaration of war, Gallatin complained to the president that Secretary Hamilton still had not sent the needed cruising orders. Those orders, he wrote, “ought to have been sent yesterday, and…at all events not one day longer ought to be lost.” After a hurried cabinet meeting on Monday, June 22, orders were at last dispatched to New York by an express rider. Rodgers was ordered to divide his force into two squadrons, to cruise in the offing near New York and Norfolk, respectively. The chief objective, reflecting Gallatin’s influence, was to “afford to our returning commerce all possible protection—nationally & individually. The safe return of our commercial vessels is obviously of the highest importance.”
These orders were never received. Commodore Rodgers and his five-ship squadron sailed from New York the day before they were written. It was not the first time an American commander had sailed without orders, nor would it be the last. The commodore’s decision bordered on insubordination, but it also revealed boldness, initiative, and a keenness to be at sea. Rodgers grasped what Hamilton may have only dimly understood—that every hour lost to dithering gave the enemy another hour to react to the American declaration of war.
On the afternoon of the twenty-second, in the offing south of Long Island, the squadron fell in with an American merchant brig inbound to New York from Madeira. Her master told Commodore Rodgers he had been boarded, one day earlier, by the British frigate Belvidera. The squadron continued on to the east before gentle westerly breezes.
Shortly after first light the next morning, 100 miles southeast of Nantucket Shoal, the President’s lookout sighted a “large Sail” to the northeast, and Rodgers made the signal for a general chase. The stranger hoisted unintelligible signals, and when they were not answered by the Americans, she tacked and made sail to windward. The wind having veered into the north, the American vessels were obliged to sail close-hauled in light breezes, frequently wetting their sails to make them hold the wind better. By a quarter past seven, the stranger was hull-up on the northeast horizon. Rodgers did not doubt she was the Belvidera.
The President had a well-earned reputation as a fast ship, and she gained rapidly on the chase. She also outsailed the United States, the Congress, and the rest of the American squadron, which fell behind to leeward. At eleven, the President cleared for action. Soon afterward, the Belvidera hoisted British colors.
In midafternoon, the breeze subsided to a near calm. The Belvidera was near enough for Rodgers to observe her closely through his telescope, but just beyond the extreme range of President’s 24-pounder long guns. She was rated as a 36-gun frigate, though she mounted 42. She was significantly smaller and lighter than the President. Her captain, Richard Byron, had not yet received word of the American declaration of war, but he had no doubt of the Americans’ hostile intentions. As Belvidera coasted along with bare steerageway, just out of range of her pursuer, Byron calmly sent the hands to dinner. There was no reason they should fight on empty stomachs.
The first shot of the War of 1812 was fired at 4:20 p.m. on June 23. The President having gradually closed to within long range of the Belvidera, Commodore Rodgers picked up a slow-match and touched it to the primer of one of the President’s bow-mounted chase guns. Before the ball had even reached the British ship, Belvidera’s four stern chasers—two long 18-pounders and two 32-pounder carronades—responded. The range diminished as the American ship overtook her adversary. The President’s early volleys were well directed. Shots struck the Belvidera’s rudder-coat, crashed into Captain Byron’s cabin, and dented the muzzle of one of the enemy’s larboard chase guns. A British seaman was killed and several other men, including the armorer and the carpenter, were severely wounded.
To win the engagement, President needed only to detain the Belvidera long enough to allow the rest of the American squadron to sail into range. In that case, Captain Byron would probably be forced to surrender. But at 4:30 p.m, the President suffered a devastating accident. One of the chase guns on her main deck burst, tearing a gaping hole in the forecastle and killing or wounding sixteen men. It was a horrific scene, with bodies and parts of bodies strewn along the deck. Rodgers himself was among the casualties—one of his legs was bloodied and broken. The President’s larboard guns fell silent while the crew removed the dead and wounded and heaved new weapons into position.
The wounded Rodgers ordered the President to yaw to larboard, a maneuver that brought her full starboard broadside into action. He hoped that the concentrated fire of the flagship’s starboard guns would knock away one of Belvidera’s masts or spars, preventing her escape. There would be no such luck. The British frigate made sail and was soon out of range of the American guns. At sundown, the Belvidera’s crew lightened her by cutting away two small bower anchors, throwing two boats over the side, and dumping 14 tons of fresh water into the sea. They knotted and spliced her damaged rigging and repaired her injured main topmast. After nightfall, the Belvidera altered her course to the east, unseen by the Americans. By dawn on the twenty-fourth, she was out of danger. She reached Halifax on July 1, and notified the British station chief, Vice-Admiral Herbert Sawyer, that hostilities had commenced.
The damage sustained by the President was severe, but not severe enough to induce Rodgers to return to port. The Jamaica convoy remained his main objective. For three days, the American squadron lay to as the flagship licked her wounds and the commodore allowed his fractured leg to be set by the surgeon. Two midshipmen and a marine who had been killed in the action were buried at sea with the customary honors. On June 26, the squadron set sail to the northeast to hunt the convoy.
AT THE OUTSET OF WAR, the Washington Navy Yard was the best-supplied naval shipyard in the country, but its stores were rapidly depleted as requests for powder, armament, and supplies poured in from naval stations to the north and south. On July 9, the commandant, Thomas Tingey, told the Navy Office that the yard did not have a single 18-pounder or 24-pounder cannon ball, and only ten barrels of gunpowder left in the magazine. Softwood timbers for masts and spars were scarce. A shipment of good black spruce logs had arrived from Maine, but several of the longest, including a bowsprit originally intended for the Constellation, had been finagled by Captain Isaac Hull for the repairs to the Constitution. Constellation was therefore obliged to remain moored in the Eastern Branch until new timbers could be brought up the river.
Isaac Hull had been bred to the sea. Born in Derby, Connecticut, he had first shipped out as a common sailor aboard a merchantman at the age of fourteen. He was “rather short and thick-set, with a countenance deeply bronzed by long exposure to sun and weather, he having gone to sea when a boy.” He was a man “of plain, unassuming ma
nners, and rather silent than loquacious.” Hull had entered the service as sixth lieutenant aboard the ship he now commanded, on her maiden cruise in 1798. Among the enlisted men, he was perhaps the most popular captain in the service. He was also, perhaps, the greatest all-round seaman in the navy, with a genius for ship-handling and navigation that would serve him well in the weeks to come.
In the spring, Constitution’s rigging had been almost entirely replaced, her hull recaulked, her masts stripped and partly replaced, her planking replaced, her lower decks thoroughly washed, her ballast rinsed and reseated. She was rigged with new sky poles and a split dolphin striker, allowing her to carry more sail than ever before. At first it was thought that the frigate’s bottom might need to be re-coppered, but when she was hove down, a journal entry noted: “bottom better than was Expected.” After almost a decade in service, Paul Revere’s copper was mostly sound, needing only some local patching along the centerline and starboard side. The officer who oversaw these operations at the Washington Navy Yard was Nathaniel “Jumping Billy” Haraden, who had served under Commodore Preble in the Third Mediterranean Squadron as sailing master of the Constitution, and knew the ship as well as any man in the service. During the refitting operations, Secretary Hamilton toured the ship several times. It was the most extensive overhaul the Constitution had ever received in her fifteen-year career, and she began the War of 1812 in exceptional condition.