Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Not until the end of August did the requested court of inquiry take the testimony of Commodore Rodgers and his officers. Stephen Decatur sat as president. Twelve days and fifty witnesses later, the court released its report, which accepted as fact all of the particulars in Rodgers’s account: that the engagement had begun with a single cannon shot from the Little Belt; that Rodgers had twice attempted to hail the English captain during the exchange, attempting to call a cease-fire; that the British were entirely responsible for the losses they had suffered.

  Captain Bingham and his officers were equally adamant in maintaining that the President had fired the first shot, and the British inquiry confirmed that version of events. The Naval Chronicle made a great deal of the sworn statements of two seamen, recorded in Halifax a month after the engagement, who claimed to have served aboard the President during the action and subsequently deserted. One stated that the action had commenced when a gun in the American frigate’s second division was fired by accident. His testimony, however, was discredited by his identification of the American lieutenant commanding the division as “Lieutenant Belling,” a name that did not appear on the President’s muster rolls. It will never be known which vessel fired first.

  The President–Little Belt affair prompted a new round of editorial fulminating on both sides of the Atlantic. “The blood of our murdered countrymen must be revenged,” declared the Morning Courier in London, choosing words that could have been taken verbatim from an American newspaper four years earlier. To the issue of which ship fired first, the Gazette asked: “[W]ho will put the veracity of an American captain in competition with that of an honorable British officer?” The Baltimore-based Niles’ Register answered that Rodgers was a man “of known reputation and unsullied character, whose honor is as unimpeachable as his courage is unquestioned.” Captain Bingham, on the other hand, was “an unknown impertinent fellow,” whose testimony was “false and scandalous.”

  Most Americans seemed to share Secretary Hamilton’s view that the rough handling of the Little Belt was a just comeuppance. Whether President or Little Belt had fired the first shot, said Niles’, was beside the point. The Royal Navy had invited the punishment by its own misconduct. “Will any man say that Great Britain would suffer our ships to hover on her coasts, impress her seamen, murder her subjects in the mouths of her harbors, and capture her ships as they enter or leave her ports? Certainly not.”

  AS THE FIRST SESSION of the Twelfth Congress opened in November 1811, the members sensed that their decisions would have long-lasting and historic consequences. “Never did the American Congress assemble under circumstances of greater interest and responsibility,” said the Boston Chronicle. Madison’s annual message, delivered to Capitol Hill on November 5, protested England’s “war on our lawful commerce,” and asked Congress to put the nation “into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis.”

  Congress had been transformed by the rise to prominence of a Republican faction known as the “War Hawks.” Their leader was a thirty-five-year-old Kentuckian, Henry Clay, who was elected Speaker of the House on the first day of the session. The House Foreign Relations Committee, weighted with Clay’s War Hawk allies, reported to the full House on November 29. The report recited grievances against both France and England, dwelling on violations of American maritime rights by the Royal Navy, including “the practice of forcing our mariners into the British navy, in violation of the rights of our flag, carried on with unabated rigor and severity.” Resolutions called for filling the ranks of a 10,000-man army, mobilizing the militias, arming merchantmen, and returning the remaining vessels of the navy to active service. Congressman Peter Porter of New York told his colleagues that they should consider the resolutions as precursors to war: “Do not let us raise armies unless we intend to employ them.”

  Clay and his allies were young, charismatic, strong-willed, intellectually gifted, and well organized. In stirring, well-coordinated speeches, they made skillful use of the rhetoric and mythology of the American Revolution to press the case for a second war against England. They returned again and again to the same line of reasoning. The sole remaining alternative to war was submission to British domination. Submission would be tantamount to a surrender of American independence, betraying the sacrifices of the patriots of 1776. “We must now oppose further encroachments of Great Britain by war,” argued Johnson of Kentucky, “or formally annul the Declaration of Independence.” “If we submit,” agreed Calhoun of South Carolina, “the independence of this nation is lost.”

  In deference to the naval power of Great Britain, many of the War Hawks argued that the United States should strike at Canada. Seizing Canadian territory, they said, would compensate America for its losses at sea, break the power of British-allied Indian tribes in the Northwest, and force England to the negotiating table. “We shall drive the British from our continent,” said Felix Grundy of Tennessee; “…I am willing to receive the Canadas as adopted brethren.” With an eye to invading Canada, a resolution was passed calling for a 250 percent increase in the authorized size of the permanent army, to 35,000 men.

  If the main thrust of an American war effort was to be an invasion of Canada, it would leave little role for the navy. But there were voices among the War Hawks calling for a major naval mobilization. Chief among them was Langdon Cheves of South Carolina, chairman of the Naval Committee, who asked the House for the fantastic sum of $7.5 million to build ten new frigates and twelve 74-gun battleships. Holding the floor for two days in mid-January 1812, Cheves calculated that the United States had spent a cumulative total of $27.2 million on the U.S. Navy since the original “six frigates” bill in 1794, compared with cumulative expenditures of $37.5 million on the U.S. Army. Citing the Quasi War and the Tripolitan War, Cheves said that the navy had been the more “useful” and “honorable” of the two services. In response to objections that American naval forces would be trapped in port by a British blockade, Cheves replied (with impressive foresight) that for every American warship in port, three British warships of equal or greater force would be required to blockade her. Such a heavy strain on the Royal Navy would force the British to the negotiating table. “The God of Nature did not give to the United States a coast of two thousand miles in extent, not to be used.”

  The debate that followed Cheves’s presentation dominated the House’s agenda for almost ten full days, filling nearly 200 pages of small print in the Annals of Congress. It was the longest and in some ways the most interesting naval debate that had ever been held in Congress. Pro-navalists conjured up the old dread of a standing army and saluted the navy as “less dangerous to your civil institutions.” Republican Samuel Mitchell of New York said the war against England should be fought on land and sea: “To employ an army alone would be to fight with one hand tied behind our back. To equip a naval force in aid of the other is to strike with both hands.” Federalist Josiah Quincy mocked the strategy of attacking Canada to punish England’s behavior at sea. “If you had a field to defend in Georgia,” he said, “it would be very strange to put up a fence in Massachusetts. And yet, how does this differ from invading Canada for the purpose of defending our maritime rights?”

  As in 1794, 1799, 1803, and every other year in which the question had been debated, the anti-navalists marshaled their traditional arguments, which had changed very little. A large European-style navy, said Samuel McKee of Kentucky, would mean the end of peace in America because it would establish “a class of society who are interested in creating and keeping up wars and contention. Officers in the army and navy are mere cyphers in society in times of peace, and are only respectable in time of war, when wealth and fame may await their exertions.” The anti-navalists’ favorite argument remained the same—that the navy was an unconscionable waste. The cost of a navy, said Adam Seybert of Pennsylvania, “far exceeds the profit which arises from the commerce which it is intended to protect.” Reading from Navy Department reports, Seybert reviewed the total expenditures for m
aintenance and repairs on a single American frigate, the Constitution. He found that she had consumed, between 1800 and 1807, “the enormous sum of $302,582, or upwards of $43,000 per annum for seven years in succession.” And what was the likely outcome of a naval war with Great Britain? Constitution and the other oceangoing vessels of the U.S. Navy would be swept up by the powerful English fleets. “Shall I be pardoned, sir,” asked Seybert, “when I fear our vessels will only tend to swell the present catalog of the British navy?”

  On January 10, Treasury Secretary Gallatin threw a hand grenade into the midst of this debate by announcing that a war mobilization would require a loan of $10 million, which in turn would require higher customs duties and new taxes on property. Opposition to internal taxes was written on every page of the Republican Party’s history, and many Republicans, even those in the pro-war camp, flatly refused to vote for them. Gallatin’s reminder of the fiscal limitations put Congress in a more parsimonious mood, and Cheves’s naval program was defeated across the board, though a few of the votes were tantalizingly close. In the end, Congress voted only to fit out the frigates not currently in service, including the Chesapeake and Constellation, both in ordinary at the Washington Navy Yard.

  AT THE START OF APRIL 1812, Congress approved a ninety-day embargo. This was not intended as a measure of economic coercion, like Jefferson’s embargo. It was a prelude to a declaration of war, aimed at ensuring the American merchant fleet would be safe in port at the commencement of hostilities. Few merchants or shipowners seemed to take the prospect of war seriously, however, and the seaports were bustling as vessels were readied to sail before the embargo took effect on April 4. Freight costs leapt by 20 percent, seamen’s wages doubled, and 140 ships sailed from New York alone. Insurance rates remained low. “We hear from all quarters that the people do not expect war,” said Congressman Lowndes.

  There was still hope that ongoing diplomatic efforts in Europe would bear fruit. In April and May, the nation’s leaders expected dispatches to arrive from London in the brig Hornet, commanded by Master Commandant James Lawrence. Week after week went by, and there was no word of her. At last, on May 19, she arrived in New York Harbor. The news was not encouraging. Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, in instructions to Ambassador John Foster dated April 10, had refused to withdraw the offending Orders in Council. Taking this letter as the last word of the British government, Madison prepared to ask the Congress for a declaration of war.

  The president faced a dilemma: Should he ask for a declaration of war against Britain, France, or both? Napoleon’s violations of American maritime rights had been no less grievous than England’s, and it was clear that France, in spite of the soothing words in the Cadore Letter of the previous year, had no intention of relaxing the Continental System. Mailing copies of the Hornet’s dispatches to Jefferson at Monticello, Madison wrote in a covering note: “France has done nothing towards adjusting our differences with her…the business is become more than ever puzzling.” The cabinet had considered a “triangular war,” declared against each of the major belligerents simultaneously, but that option presented “a thousand difficulties.” Though France was not capable of striking directly at the United States by either land or sea, a declared war between the United States and France would deny American privateers the use of French Channel ports, from which they could otherwise attack British shipping in that nation’s home waters.

  During a long speech in the House on May 29, John Randolph mocked the War Hawks for talking bravely of war while failing to prepare for it. “Go to war without money, without men, without a navy!” he cried—“Go to war when we have not the courage, while your lips utter war, to lay war taxes! When your whole courage is exhibited in passing Resolutions! The people will not believe it!” The long European war, said Randolph, was none of America’s business: “It is a war unexampled in the history of mankind. A war, separated as we are from the theater of it by a wide ocean, from which it behooves us to stand aloof, to set our backs against the wall, and await the coming of the enemy, instead of rushing out at midnight in search of the disturbers of our rest, when a thousand daggers are pointed at our bosoms.”

  Randolph’s objections rang true to an older generation of Americans, who had lived through the devastation of the Revolution. Most of the War Hawks were too young to remember the terror that fell over New York City in June 1776, when a gigantic British fleet appeared suddenly off Staten Island, or the way Washington’s army of novices had been driven like a herd of cattle from Brooklyn, to Manhattan, to New Jersey, to Pennsylvania. They were too young to remember the long, ruinous occupations of New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Norfolk, and Charleston, or the quick work made by the British in sweeping the Continental Navy from the sea. Fear of a war’s consequences rose in proportion to a community’s proximity to the ocean. The citizens of Providence, Rhode Island, enacted resolutions against “this wild spirit of war.” Amphibious assaults on the coast would “leave us with our houseless wives and children, amidst the smoking fragments of our habitations.” “It is evident that under the circumstances of this country,” the Boston Centinel editorialized on May 30, “a declaration of war would be in effect a license and booty offered by our government to the British fleet to scour our coasts—to sweep our remaining navigation from the ocean, to annihilate our commerce, and to drive the country, by a rapid declension, into that state of poverty and distress which attended the close of the revolutionary struggle.”

  In London, America’s ninety-day embargo was taken as a prelude to a declaration of war. Admiralty orders were dispatched to Halifax and Newfoundland, alerting local naval commanders to the likelihood of hostilities and instructing them, should war be declared, “to attack, take or sink, burn or destroy, all ships or vessels belonging to the United States or to the citizens thereof.” At the same time, however, influential British voices were urging that the government act to avert the war. The various trade sanctions aimed at England—Napoleon’s Continental System, the American non-importation measures, the new American embargo—were blamed for growing internal economic pressures. Unemployment in London and Manchester had doubled in two years. Unemployed textile workers in Nottingham rallied behind the radical leadership of a figure named Ned Ludd, and the “Luddites,” as they came to be known, attacked wool and cotton mills and destroyed machinery that was thought to have displaced workers. The movement escalated into a large-scale revolt, requiring the deployment of more than ten thousand British troops. Petitions arrived at the Houses of Parliament, signed by industrial worker groups in Leicester, Birmingham, and Liverpool, asking that the Tory ministry of Spencer Percival repeal the offending Orders in Council.

  On May 11, a deranged assassin shot and killed Prime Minister Percival as he entered the House of Commons. His successor, Lord Liverpool, favored a more pragmatic policy toward the Americans, and on June 12, Lord Castlereagh announced the repeal of the offending Orders in Council. Had the news been known immediately in Washington, the War of 1812, in all likelihood, would never have been declared. But the first transatlantic telegraph cable would not be laid until half a century later, and the time lags required for diplomatic communication ensured that the news did not reach the United States until several weeks after the fact.

  Ignorant of the encouraging developments on the far side of the Atlantic, President Madison delivered his war message to Congress on June 1. Though the message occasionally veered into the Virginian’s habitually dry, courtly prose, it also included a blunt indictment of the entire British policy, which he termed a “series of acts hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation.” He cited incursions into American territorial waters, impressment of American seamen (a “crying enormity”), confiscations of American ships and property, paper blockades, and alleged incitements of Indians in the Northwest Territories. Reviewing at length the diplomacy surrounding the Orders in Council, Madison concluded that England’s policy had little to do with waging war and ev
erything to do with her desire to seize a “monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation.”

  In the House, a war bill was introduced and debated behind closed doors. Protesting Federalists insisted that the doors be opened to the public; when outvoted, they boycotted the debate. The House took three days to declare war, by a vote of 79–49, with every Federalist and several Republicans voting against. Senate action was delayed by the question of whether the war should be limited to maritime operations, in the tradition of the Quasi War. Such a war could be carried on largely through privateers, requiring no government funding, and leave in Madison’s hands the power to end the conflict at any time by executive order. Opponents of the proposal believed Canada to be Britain’s Achilles’ heel, and argued that an invasion of the north was the key to American victory.

  The Senate turned back the “sea war only” bill by the narrowest possible margin: a tie vote, broken by the president pro tempore of the Senate. This allowed the declaration of war to come to a vote on June 18. It passed by a margin of 17–13. In the congressional tally, nearly 40 percent of the members, including every Federalist in each house, had voted in the negative. No other declaration of war has ever passed the U.S. Congress by such a narrow margin.

  On the afternoon of June 19, after signing the declaration, Madison paid a visit to the modest two-story brick building, just west of the White House, that served as joint headquarters of the State, War, and Navy Departments. There he circulated among a crowd of officers, functionaries, clerks, and various other well-wishers. Treasury Comptroller Richard Rush, who took part in the festivities, remarked that the president conducted himself “in a manner worthy of a little commander-in-chief, with his little round hat and huge cockade.”