by Ian W. Toll
The presence of the Cambrian and the Leander off New York began to seem more and more, in the spring of 1806, like a peacetime blockade. Among American merchants and seamen, the names of the two ships were notorious. An incident on April 24 ignited a firestorm of public anger. Leander fired a warning shot across the bow of an incoming merchantman. The ball skipped off the sea and struck the quarter-rail of another vessel, the Richard, a small Delaware coasting sloop. A splinter thrown off by the impact decapitated the Richard’s helmsman, John Pierce. Later that afternoon, Pierce’s head and body were brought ashore in lower Manhattan and paraded through the streets by an angry mob. Stones were thrown through the windows of the English consul’s house, and British officers who happened to be in the city were obliged to go into hiding. The martyr’s body was placed in public exhibition outside the Tontine Coffee House. A grand jury indicted Henry Whitby, captain of the Leander, on a charge of murder.
In the following weeks, as the news spread north and south, so did the general sense of outrage. “I well remember the sensation excited by the murder of Pierce,” Congressman DeWitt Clinton of New York later recalled. “It was a glow of patriotic fire that pervaded the whole community; from Georgia to Maine it was felt like an electrical shock.”
On the same day the news reached Washington, Jefferson issued a proclamation. Captain Whitby of the Leander, if and when he ever set foot on American territory, was to be arrested and delivered up to the authorities in New York to answer the murder charge. The Leander, the Cambrian, and a third vessel, the Driver, were ordered to “immediately & without any delay depart from the harbours & waters of the U.S.” If the banished frigates did not abide by the order, American citizens were forbidden to provide them with provisions, fresh water, pilotage services, or “supplies of any kind.”
Privately, Jefferson said the presence of the Royal Navy at Sandy Hook was “an atrocious violation of our territorial rights.” He considered sending three American frigates to New York to enforce his order, but decided instead to accept Ambassador Merry’s assurances that the British squadron was “not to remain there.” Writing Ambassador James Monroe in London on May 4, Jefferson seemed determined to assert American hegemony in the western Atlantic:
England may, by petty larceny, thwartings, check us on [the sea] a little, but nothing she can do will retard us there one year’s growth. We shall be supported there by other nations, & thrown into their scale to make a part of the great counterpoise to her navy…. We have the seamen & materials for 50 ships of the line, & half that number of frigates; and were France to give us the money & England the dispositions to equip them, [Americans] would give to England serious proofs of the stock from which they are sprung, & the school in which they have been taught….
We begin to broach the idea that we consider the whole Gulf Stream as of our waters, in which hostilities & cruising are to be frowned on for the present, and prohibited so soon as either consent or force will permit us.
THE END OF THE TRIPOLITAN WAR had been followed by another naval downsizing. Jefferson had ordered the officers furloughed, the enlisted men discharged, and the vessels laid up in ordinary (mothballed). As in 1801, Jefferson insisted that all the frigates be navigated up the Potomac to the Washington Navy Yard, where they would be “under the immediate eye” of the government and would require just “one set of plunderers” to look after them. By mid-December 1805, five of the six original frigates were at the yard, either dismantled or in the process of being dismantled. Only the Constitution remained in service, patrolling the Mediterranean against renewed aggression by the Barbary States.
With an eye on the increasing Anglo-American tensions at sea, Navy Secretary Robert Smith began pressing for a large-scale naval buildup in the spring of 1806. He proposed to return all the frigates to service and ask Congress to fund a crash program to build battleships and gunboats. Albert Gallatin, still a fiscal superhawk in spite of the huge revenue surpluses pouring into the treasury, asked whether a large navy, “by encouraging wars and drawing us in the usual vortex of expenses and foreign relations, [would] be the cause of greater evils than those it is intended to prevent….” Gallatin attacked Smith’s management of the Navy Department and his frequent “loose demands for Money.” The intracabinet debate soon escalated into a feud in which the Smith family’s formidable influence in Congress came into play.
For the moment, Congress was more interested in harbor defense than the blue-water navy; and after some debate it appropriated funds for seaport fortifications ($150,000) and gunboats ($250,000) on April 21, 1806. The same legislation limited the number of naval personnel to 13 captains, 9 masters commandant, 72 lieutenants, 150 midshipmen, and 925 sailors. The navy was to sell any vessel that “is so much out of repair that it will not be for the interest of the United States to repair the same.”
Officers not actively employed were placed on half pay, and since half pay was rarely sufficient to live comfortably ashore, many found themselves scrambling for berths on merchant vessels. “I have obtained a furlough, and have got a ship for China,” Master Commandant Isaac Chauncey wrote Edward Preble. “…If I can bring any thing for you from that country, it will afford me pleasure to receive your commands. I see no prospect of Congress doing any thing for the Navy or officers, therefore the sooner we can get good employ in private Ships the better….” Some of the midshipmen were even willing to sail “before the mast”—that is, as common seamen.
Even during periods when most naval vessels were out of service, competition for appointments and promotions was intense. There was never a time in the pre–1815 navy when there were not at least four or five candidates for every one vacancy in the naval officer corps. Robert Smith took the subject of appointments and promotions very seriously, and the result was a material improvement in the overall quality of the officer corps during his eight-year tenure at the Navy Department. Chief Navy Accountant Charles Goldsborough said Smith “was particularly happy in discovering the merits of the most promising young officers of the Navy.” Under his administration, new officers entered the service and learned the ropes in early adolescence.
An application for a midshipman’s berth included all the same basic elements as a modern-day college admissions application—evidence of prior academic achievement, letters of recommendation, and an essay composed in the young applicant’s own hand. A successful campaign was mounted on behalf of sixteen-year-old Charley Boarman of Georgetown. Charley’s application arrived at the Navy Office with a letter of recommendation from the mayor of Washington, Robert Brent, who confessed that “The son is not personally known to me” but added that Charley’s father “has sustained the best possible character.” Also enclosed was Mr. Boarman’s letter to the mayor, in which he described his son’s academic qualifications: Charley had been enrolled for some years at Georgetown College and “consequently, has studied the languages for a certain space of time and is as well versed in arithmetic as most of his age generally are.” Lastly, there was Charley’s own letter:
Though sixteen years old, I already begin to think myself a man! And why not? Alexander, it is said, was a little man, yet fame gives him the credit and honor of possessing a great soul! May not, Sir, great feats be performed by a little David as well as by a Goliath? Methinks I already hear the roaring of the cannons, and my soul, impatient of delay, impetuously hurries me on to the scene of action!
All agreed that naval officers could only be trained and seasoned while serving actively at sea. In the years after the Tripolitan War, when most of the frigates were out of service, such opportunities were limited. If they could not go to sea, however, midshipmen could at least receive schooling and instruction on shore. Between 1805 and 1807, midshipmen attended daily classes in writing, mathematics, and navigation aboard the frigate Congress as she lay moored in the East Branch near the Washington Navy Yard. Congress was thus the original forebear of the U.S. Naval Academy.
Secretary Smith was equally tenacious i
n choosing the men who would enter the lists of captain and master commandants, and he sometimes promoted junior officers over the heads of their more senior colleagues. By July 1807, the median age of the captains and master commandants in the navy was thirty-four. Several of the leading figures in the command ranks had been promoted at an early age. Both John Rodgers and William Bainbridge had won promotion to captain at age twenty-six, during the Quasi War. Twenty-five-year-old Stephen Decatur, as a reward for the destruction of the Philadelphia, had won a two-rung promotion from midlevel lieutenant to captain, bypassing altogether the rank of master commandant. The men thus leapfrogged were deeply resentful. For Lieutenant Andrew Sterrett, who had not won promotion after capturing a Tripolitan galley while commanding the Enterprise in 1801, it was too much to bear. He submitted his resignation, telling Secretary Smith he found it “impossible to be reconciled to the promotion of a junior officer over me, nor is it compatible with correct principles of honor to serve under him.” Smith was unmoved. Promotions rewarding extraordinary conduct in action, he said, would stimulate others to “deeds of equal valor.” The secretary was sorry to lose Sterrett, but he accepted the resignation rather “than give up a principle believed essential to the good of the service…and holding out to all equally the means of obtaining its benefits.”
WITH THE DEATH OF WILLIAM PITT in January 1806, his ministry was succeeded by Lord Grenville’s “Ministry of All the Talents.” The new foreign minister was Charles James Fox, a Whig leader who had argued (among other things) for the rights of Irish Catholics, a negotiated peace with France, British parliamentary reform, and respect for the maritime rights of neutrals. Fox was thought to be a friend of America, and Jefferson greeted the news of his appointment with relief. “In Mr. Fox, personally, I have more confidence than in any man in England,” he told Monroe. “…While he shall be in the administration, my reliance on that government will be solid.” Though the new government did not order an immediate suspension of the Essex ruling, the “Fox Blockade” of northern France and Germany implicitly acquiesced in the resumption of an unmolested re-export trade.
Whatever Fox’s personal inclinations, however, it was soon clear that there would be no fundamental change in British policy. The press and public opinion, still under the influence of War in Disguise, resented America’s spectacular rise as a commercial and maritime rival. The English newspapers reprinted excerpts from the debates in the U.S. Congress on defense and naval measures, and it was plain that America was not arming for war. It was not building or launching new warships, it was not recruiting new troops, and it was doing only the bare minimum to fortify its seaports. If the United States was neither willing nor able to fight, why should England, so often compelled to fight for its own survival throughout the centuries, lift a finger to placate this insolent ex-colony?
James Monroe and a second American envoy, William Pinkney, managed to negotiate a new treaty with the British government in the fall of 1806. The Monroe-Pinkney Treaty would have secured for American merchants a specific set of guarantees allowing them to prosper in the wartime neutral trade, and barred British naval cruisers from stopping and searching American shipping within five miles of the American coast. However, the treaty also committed the American government to lift trade sanctions imposed on England, and failed to address basic points demanded by Jefferson and Madison, including a ban on impressment of seamen from American ships and compensation for shipping losses after the Essex decision. Jefferson declined to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification.
In any case, the Monroe-Pinkney treaty was quickly rendered obsolete by new developments in Europe. In the fall of 1805, Napoleon’s victories over the Austrians and Russians at the battles of Ulm (October 16–20) and Austerlitz (December 2) had left him the seemingly invincible master of continental Europe, and secured for him a place alongside Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan as one of the greatest conquerors of all time. Interposed chronologically between those two battles was the British victory at Trafalgar (October 21), which had left England the undisputed champion of the world’s oceans. With France unable to strike England at sea, and England not yet able to strike France on land, the two belligerents, separated by a 22-mile channel, were like two hostile dogs chained to opposite posts, nose to nose but not close enough to fight.
Earlier restrictions on neutral trade had dealt principally with enemy contraband. After 1806, France and England entered into full-scale economic warfare. In November 1806, Napoleon issued the “Berlin Decree,” which purported to place the entire British Isles in a state of blockade. The decree created the infamous “Continental System,” which was aimed at starving England by cutting off its trade with continental Europe. Because there was not much of a French navy left afloat, the purported blockade had no real effect, other than as a pretext for condemning neutral ships seized in a European port. The real blow to American commerce came with a British countermeasure, decreed by the Grenville ministry in January 1807. The Order in Council declared that no vessel could sail from one port to another while both ports were under French or French-allied control. Since it was the practice of American ships to sail from port to port seeking out the best prices for their cargoes, the dueling French and British measures of 1806 and early 1807, taken together, rendered most categories of American commerce with continental Europe subject to capture by either Napoleon’s coalition or by Britain.
Though Jefferson occasionally took a bellicose tone in private letters, he was not prepared to ask Congress for a military buildup. He continued to hope that the European war might end in a negotiated peace. The president’s annual message for 1806 dismissed a proposed mobilization of troops: “Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible in our horizon, we never should have been without them. Our resources would have been exhausted on dangers which have never happened, instead of being reserved for what is really to take place.” He also continued to resist Navy Secretary Smith’s calls for frigates and battleships, regarding them as excessively costly and hopelessly overmatched by the Royal Navy. Instead, Jefferson grew infatuated with the idea of building a large fleet of small, shallow-draft gunboats.
Gunboats were 50 to 75 feet in length, 15 to 20 feet in the beam, and armed with a single 24- or 32-pounder long gun on the bow. They were copper-bottomed, rigged with one or two masts, and manned by a crew of twenty to thirty men. They could be sailed in a wind or rowed in a calm. Designed for inland waters and harbor defense, they were not seaworthy enough to be trusted far from shore. Josiah Fox, who supervised the fitting out of some of the first American-built gunboats, compared them to the crafts used by oystermen on the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. Commodore Preble had employed borrowed Italian gunboats with some success in the 1804 attacks on Tripoli Harbor.
The gunboats were never popular with the Federalists, who regarded them as poor substitutes for frigates and ships of the line. On September 8, 1804, during a “dreadful Storm,” the first American-built gunboat was driven from her moorings off Whitemarsh Island, Georgia, and landed high and dry in a corn field. She lay there, stranded, for almost two months. The Federalist newspaper Connecticut Courant gleefully commented that the gunboat might, if left in the field, “grow into a ship of the line by the time we go to war with Spain. Should this new experiment in agriculture succeed, we may expect to see the rice-swamps of Carolina and the tobacco fields of Virginia turned by our philosophical Government into dry-docks and gunboat gardens.”
The theory of gunboat defense was not ridiculous on its face. Advocates pointed to the long, lightly populated American coastline, impossible to defend at every vulnerable point with fixed fortifications. Gunboat flotillas could serve as floating, mobile batteries to be brought into action wherever the enemy chose to attack. A fleet of large warships concentrated the navy’s entire capital into a handful of assets that could be captured in the first few weeks of a war. A fleet of several gunboats could not be taken all at once. Advocates
also maintained that gunboats were more economical than larger warships, though that premise was subsequently refuted by cost overruns.
The gunboat navy appealed to the Jeffersonians because it took their cherished archetype of national defense—the local citizens’ militia—and transferred it into the realm of naval warfare. Just as the infantry militia was the Republican alternative to a standing army, gunboats offered an alternative to a standing navy. They would be built by local shipwrights and manned by local crews. Like infantry militias, naval militias and their gunboats were unmistakably intended for home defense and not foreign military adventures. Because gunboats were all but useless in the open ocean, Jefferson said, they could never “become an excitement to engage in offensive maritime war, toward which [they] would furnish no means.” Posing no threat to the Royal Navy, they were unlikely to provoke the English to a preemptive attack. In peacetime, they could be hauled up on shore to be stored under protective sheds, and their crews returned to their usual livelihoods.
