Six Frigates

  The Naval Chronicle declined to elaborate on the details of the Java’s loss, confessing: “The subject is too painful for us to dwell upon.” But the same issue carried the report of a bloody action between the French frigate Arethuse and the HMS Amelia off Sierra Leone on March 7. Arethuse had fought with unexpected ferocity, killing more than half the crew of the Amelia, and the Frenchman had subsequently escaped. “Is it not obvious,” asked the Chronicle, “that they are stimulated by American triumphs?” Englishmen dreaded nothing so much as the resurrection of French naval power. For more than a decade, French officers and sailors had been cowed by the “superstitious terror” that their defeat was inevitable, leaving them “half-conquered” before a single shot was ever fired. The Americans now threatened to supply a jolt of courage to the remnants of Napoleon’s navy—perhaps even to arouse a “spirit of emulation and national rivalry.”

  For the first time in years, there was the kind of sharp public criticism that was the essential first step toward reform—criticism aimed at the distended Admiralty bureaucracy, the politicization of naval promotions and assignments, the corrupting influence of prize money, the neglect of the North American Station. Contemplating the lopsided casualties suffered aboard the British ships in the three recent actions, some speculated that the Americans had discovered some innovation that enhanced the “destructive havoc of their broadsides.” Was it their use of lead (instead of cloth) cartridges? Was it some new type of firing lock, or gunsight? A correspondent to the Chronicle wondered: “Are their rammers, sponges, worms, wads, shot, crows, handspikes, cartridges, tubes, powder horns, or tackle different?” Others expressed concern that British standards of gunnery had atrophied. “American seamen have been more exercised at firing at a mark than ours,” complained an officer. “We are not allowed a sufficient quantity of powder in one year to exercise the people one month.”

  Admiral Warren was evidently concerned, because he circulated a standing order, on March 6, directing his commanders to give priority to “the good discipline and the proper training of their Ships Companies to the expert management of the Guns.” All officers and seamen on the North American station were urged to keep in mind “that the issue of the Battle will greatly depend on the cool, steady and regular manner in which the Guns shall be loaded, pointed & fired.” Two weeks later, the Admiralty issued a circular to all the British admirals, discouraging the daily “spit and polish” scouring of the brasswork and directing that “the time thrown away on this unnecessary practice be applied to the really useful and important points of discipline and exercise at Arms.”

  Gunnery could at least be improved with practice, but there was no ready solution to the poor manning of His Majesty’s ships. With more than six hundred ships in service, manned by some 140,000 seamen and marines, the Royal Navy was stretched to the extreme limits of efficiency. Ship for ship, it could not rival the quality of the crews employed in the small, all-volunteer U.S. Navy, whose recruiting officers enjoyed the luxury of selecting the cleverest, healthiest, and most experienced men. The shock of defeat emboldened domestic critics, who now challenged the Royal Navy’s reliance on “the brutal horrors of the press,” and the disgraceful treatment of British sailors, who were crammed into overcrowded ships, fed rations that many Englishmen would not force upon their dogs, flogged half to death at the least provocation, and never paid a shilling nor allowed to set foot on shore for years on end. Was it any wonder so many seized the first opportunity to desert? Or were willing to fight under the American flag, against their former shipmates and countrymen? One correspondent wrote of the “mania of apathy and discontent” that predominated in the typical British warship, while another blamed a recruiting system that drew in “good, bad, and indifferent, viz, ordinary seamen, landsmen, foreigners, the sweepings of Newgate, from the hulks, and almost all the prisons in the country.”

  The superior force and scantlings of the American 44-gun frigates, now denounced as “disguised ships of the line,” prompted the Admiralty to issue a “Secret & Confidential” order to all station chiefs prohibiting single-frigate engagements with the Constitution, President, or United States. A lone British frigate was henceforth ordered to flee from the big American frigates, or (if it could be done safely) to shadow them at a prudent distance, remaining out of cannon-shot range, until reinforcements could be brought into action. At the same time, the Admiralty ordered a crash building program to launch ships on lines similar to those produced by Joshua Humphreys in Philadelphia almost twenty years earlier. In response to Admiral Warren’s specific request, a number of older British 74-gun ships of the line had their uppermost decks removed or “razeed.” These hybrid “razees” were not well liked in the service (officers derided them as “mules”), but the new class would at least match up to the American 44s. What the English people demanded, above all, was a fair victory over one of the big American frigates.

  MORE THAN ANY OTHER NATION, Great Britain appreciated and had mastered the art of blockade. When carried out successfully, a naval blockade struck simultaneously at an enemy’s freedom of movement, his supply lines, and his economic vitality. It protected commercial shipping by preventing enemy privateers and cruisers from sallying out of port or returning with prizes. It chipped away the foundations of the enemy’s seapower by denying him the means to keep his fleet at sea. Britain’s ten-year-old commercial and military blockade of continental Europe had largely succeeded in its twin goals of interdicting most seagoing commerce while keeping the French navy imprisoned in its ports. It was not surprising, therefore, that the main thrust of Great Britain’s naval strategy in the War of 1812 was a blockade of the American coast.

  British policy drew a distinction between a military blockade, designed to prevent American warships from getting to sea, and a commercial blockade, which aimed to cut off all merchant traffic into or out of American seaports. Ostensibly, the entire American coast came under military blockade at the outset of the war. The commercial blockade, on the other hand, was ordered in several stages. The first was a “most complete and vigorous Blockade of the Ports and Harbours of the Bay of the Chesapeake and of the River Delaware,” ordered in November 1812. The second, ordered in March 1813, extended the commercial blockade southward and northward, from New Orleans to Rhode Island. First Lord of the Admiralty Melville told Admiral Warren: “We do not intend this as a mere paper blockade, but as a complete stop to all trade & intercourse by Sea with those Ports, as far as the wind & weather, & the continual presence of a sufficient armed Force, will permit & ensure.” Considering New England as “friendly,” and hoping to negotiate a separate peace with that region, the British did not attempt to interdict American commerce north of Cape Cod until April 1814, when the commercial blockade was extended to include all of New England.

  In truth, however, the British blockade was far from perfect, and many parts of the long American coast were left completely unguarded. As the British had learned through generations of experience in Europe, the effectiveness of every blockade relied upon the close proximity of safe naval bases, and the speed at which blockading ships could be refit and reprovisioned at those bases. In Europe, the British relied on the proximity of the huge British Channel ports for resupply and repairs. In America, the main British naval bases were Halifax and Bermuda, and both were several hundred miles away from the theater of operations. Moreover, neither had a well-developed shore establishment or a labor force adequate to service large numbers of warships.

  With the force under his command, Admiral Warren was expected to achieve several different objectives simultaneously: hunt the American frigates, patrol the sea-lanes against an armada of American privateers, provide convoys for British merchantmen sailing home from the West Indies, and maintain a commercial blockade. Warren had been asked to do the impossible. Realizing that he did not have enough ships to accomplish these various objectives, he applied for reinforcements. His last letter of 1812, dated December 29, referred to “the Swa
rms of Privateers and Letters of Marque, their numbers now amounting to 600,” that infested the waters of the western Atlantic. Without “a strong addition of Ships,” he warned, “trade must inevitably suffer, if not be utterly ruined and destroyed.”

  The Lords showed little sympathy for Warren’s predicament. British naval forces were needed in the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, and the Mediterranean. England could ill afford major redeployments to the far side of the Atlantic. With heavy reluctance, they consented to withdraw “Ships from other important Services for the purpose of placing under your orders a force with which you cannot fail to bring the Naval War to a termination, either by the capture of the American National Vessels, or by strictly blockading them in their own Waters.” Warren’s forces would now amount to ten battleships, thirty frigates, and fifty sloops of war. In addition, the Admiralty sent a land force comprising two Royal Marine battalions and an artillery company to be used in coastal raids. Having placed such an enormous force under Warren’s command, the Lords expected quick results. He was to maintain the blockade, suppress the privateers, and protect British merchantmen—and in addition, “It is of the highest importance to the character and interests of the country that the naval force of the enemy should be quickly and completely disposed of.”

  A second letter from London, dated February 10, 1813, took an even harsher tone. If the estimated strength of ninety-seven British warships against fourteen American warships was accurate, asked the Lords, why did the U.S. Navy continue to exist at all? Warren commanded “a force much greater in proportion than the National Navy of the Enemy opposed to you would seem to warrant.” He must “strike some decisive blow.” As for the privateers, Warren should deal with them through a combination of blockade, convoys, and patrols, and their numbers must be “in a great degree exaggerated; as [their Lordships] cannot suppose that you have left the principal ports of the American Coast so unguarded as to permit such multitudes of Privateers to escape in and out unmolested.”

  By February 1813, Warren did indeed have a powerful force under his command: In North America, fifteen 74-gun battleships, fifteen frigates, twenty sloops of war, and nearly thirty unrated vessels. In the West Indies, he had another battleship and four frigates; in Newfoundland, a 50-gun ship and two frigates; off Brazil, a battleship, two frigates, and two brigs. The full weight of British naval power was now poised to fall on the North American coast, and Admiral Warren, under intense pressure from his superiors, gathered his strength to carry out the apparent will of the British people as expressed by the Evening Star: “All the prating about maritime rights, with which the Americans have recently nauseated the ears of every cabinet minister in Europe, must be silenced by the strong and manly voice of reason…and America must be beaten into submission!”

  DESPAIRING OF THEIR CHANCES in the presidential election of November 1812, the Federalists nominated an anti-war New York Republican, DeWitt Clinton, to lead the ticket. Clinton and his allies ran an eccentric campaign, opposing the war but occasionally condemning Madison for not fighting it hard enough, and appealing unsuccessfully to anti-Virginia jealousies in the mid-Atlantic states. Clinton carried New York and every New England state except Vermont, but lost in the electoral college by a vote of 128 to 89. With Madison’s reelection, the Virginia Republican dynasty entered its twelfth year.

  President Madison was only too happy to bask in the reflected glory of the navy that Congressman Madison had once voted not to build. In his second inaugural address, he acknowledged that the disastrous Canadian campaigns had thrown the reputation of the army “under clouds” but rejoiced that the “gallant exploits of our naval heroes proved to the world our inherent capacity to maintain our rights.” In rejecting the armistice offered by Admiral Warren, Madison redefined the war as a crusade to end the “arbitrary violence” of impressment. The Republican majority in Congress discovered a new fondness for the navy, and with the passion of the newly converted they moved to expand the fleet. A month of debate ended in a vote, two days before Christmas, for four new 74-gun battleships and six new 44-gun frigates, at a cost of $3.5 million. It was the first major naval construction program, not counting Jefferson’s gunboats, since the end of the Adams administration. (Jefferson, living in retirement at Monticello, gave credit where credit was due. “I sincerely congratulate you on the successes of our little navy,” he wrote Adams, “which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls.” Adams replied magnanimously, recalling Jefferson’s campaign to send frigates to the Mediterranean in the 1780s: “That you were always for a Navy to compel the Barbary Powers to peace, I distinctly remember in many of our personal Conversations in Europe; and I have carefully preserved very strong Letters from You full of arguments for such a Navy.”)

  Intoxicated with pride in the navy and its officers, official Washington focused its collective adulation on the one American frigate that remained in the Potomac—the Constellation, under the command of Captain Charles Stewart. On November 26, 1812, a “splendid entertainment” was held on board the ship as she lay moored in the Eastern Branch, about half a mile from the Navy Yard wharf. All of Washington society was invited, including the president and first lady. Five hundred guests were rowed out to the ship in colorfully decorated barges. The day was bitterly cold, with a freezing wind, but the Constellation’s spar deck was enclosed with flags and awnings, and heated by fires from two galley stoves so “as to make the temperature delightful.” A band played and the guests danced until three in the afternoon, when “the boatswain’s whistle called us to a magnificent dinner below.” The Madisons were seated at the head of a banquet table that extended the entire length of the gun deck. At six, the visitors were rowed back to their waiting carriages at the Navy Yard wharf, and as the president’s barge left the Constellation, the 18-pounders fired an ear-splitting salute. “We have no doubt but that the Constellation will sustain her high reputation,” Niles’ remarked, “and that Captain Stewart will direct better salutes than these to the enemy.”

  One unpleasant detail of naval business, at the outset of the new administration, was the replacement of Navy Secretary Paul Hamilton. Hamilton had been charged with having spent most of every day drunk, pouring his first glass at midmorning or earlier. Although per capita alcohol consumption was higher than in any subsequent period of American history, alcoholism, somewhat paradoxically, was taboo. Hamilton’s drinking may have been a symptom of his problems, rather than the cause of them—his plantations were verging on bankruptcy, with creditors forcing the auctioning of his slaves in groups of ten or twenty. Unlike his two predecessors, he was a planter, not a merchant. He had no prior experience in outfitting ships or overseeing the complex accounts of a large maritime organization. Bookkeeping standards declined; chaos reigned in the Navy Office; anti-navalist Republicans triumphantly pointed out that the administration could not say how vast sums had been spent, and Congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina spoke for many of his colleagues when he said that the hard-drinking South Carolinian was “about as fit for his place as the Indian prophet would be for Emperor of Europe.” Madison accepted Hamilton’s resignation on the last day of the year.

  The man appointed in his place was William Jones, the Philadelphia merchant, shipowner, and former sea captain who had declined the job when Jefferson first pressed it on him twelve years earlier. Jones had served a term in the House of Representatives and was influential in the politics of Pennsylvania. Undaunted by the blizzard of paperwork he found on his arrival in the capital, Jones threw himself into the job, and the intensity of his devotion to work placed him in the same league as Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, or Benjamin Stoddert. “As to exercise, it is out of the question, except the head and hands,” he wrote his wife in Philadelphia. “I rise at seven, breakfast at nine, dine at half-past four, eat nothing afterward…I write every night till midnight, and sleep very well when I do not think too much.” In his
first week on the job, Jones fired the navy’s Chief Clerk, who had served since 1801. By January 1814, he had replaced the entire civilian staff of the Navy Office, with the exception of a messenger. He resolved to oppose “the corruption of self-interested men who have taken root in the Establishment…like the voracious poplar, nothing can thrive in their shade.”

  As gratifying as the naval victories of 1812 had been, it was clear that the 1813 campaign would pose a larger set of problems. In embarrassing the Royal Navy, America had seized a tiger by the tail. Remarking on the excesses of the grand naval balls celebrated in Washington, Mrs. B. H. Latrobe told a friend: “We may have reason to laugh out of the other side of our mouths some of these days; and as the English are so much stronger than we are with their navy, there are ten chances to one that we are beaten.” The interruption of American commerce had caused a plunge in customs revenues, and Treasury Secretary Gallatin estimated that the federal government would require the colossal sum of $20 million to carry on the war another year. Because most of the nation’s disposable private capital was in the hands of anti-war Federalists, Gallatin told the president, “I think a loan to that amount to be altogether unattainable.” Negotiating behind closed doors with a small circle of major merchant bankers in New York and Philadelphia, among them John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard, Gallatin managed to raise a loan of $15.5 million. The funds relieved the immediate financial crisis, but another year of war would exhaust the treasury.