by Ian W. Toll
The simultaneous presence of so many needy frigates in Boston Harbor placed tremendous strains on the Charlestown Navy Yard, which was poorly equipped and understaffed. Amos Binney, the newly hired Boston Navy Agent, later recalled being overwhelmed by “the chaos that surrounded me.”
Every ship required complete supplies of provisions and every kind of stores. I was but newly appointed, had no experience, no precedents, no forms, no instructions; was obliged to form a whole system from the chaos that surrounded me, was always short or wholly destitute of funds. I resorted to the banks and to my friends for money on loans and on interest, was soon overwhelmed with requisitions from the public ships in every department—pursers, boatswains, carpenters, gunners, armourers; and frequently had half a dozen midshipmen, with as many boats’ crews, calling for stores, etc.
Eager to get the fleet to sea as quickly as possible, Secretary Hamilton was willing to throw money at the problem. On September 8, he authorized a cash warrant of $33,000 to be paid to Binney for repairs, pay, provisions, medicines, and “contingencies.” The amount was $6,000 more than Binney had requested. The secretary took it on himself to increase the sum so that “no inconvenience may arise to the public Service…. We are extremely anxious to get all our public vessels to Sea, with the least possible delay—and we confidently hope that every assistance on your part will be promptly rendered to effect this desirable object.”
Commodores Rodgers and Decatur, with President and United States as their respective flagships, sailed together from Boston on October 8. Four days later, they parted company. Decatur and the United States, accompanied by the brig Argus, sailed east toward the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. In the mid-Atlantic, Decatur ordered Argus to part ways with the flagship, believing that the two ships could cover more of the sea by cruising alone.
Stephen Decatur’s career had been closely intertwined with that of the United States since 1796. When the ship was under construction in Joshua Humphreys’s Southwark shipyard, Decatur had been employed as a teenaged captain of one of the building crews. When white oak timbers were needed for the keel of the ship, Decatur had traveled with a cutting expedition into the Catskills and the forests of western New Jersey. In his first active naval assignment, he had served aboard the United States under John Barry as a midshipman during the Quasi War. In the two years prior to the War of 1812, he had commanded her as flagship of the U.S. Navy’s southern station, based in Norfolk.
After the maiden cruise of the United States in the summer of 1798, Captain John Barry had praised her sailing qualities. In the fourteen years since, however, the big Philadelphia-built frigate had earned a reputation as a slow, unwieldy sailor. Among the enlisted men, she was affectionately known as the “Old Wagon,” though it was considered a breech of discipline to say those words within earshot of an officer. United States may not have been the world’s fastest-sailing frigate, but she was one of the most powerful. Like President and Constitution, she mounted 24-pounder long guns on her gun deck, and she was built with the same heavy live oak scantlings that had earned one of her sisters the more flattering nickname “Old Ironsides.”
At dawn on Sunday, October 25, when the United States was about 500 miles south of the Azores, the lookout hailed the deck to report a large sail on the weather beam, about 12 miles north. Though the Americans did not yet know it, the strange ship was HMS Macedonian, a 38-gun frigate commanded by Captain John Surman Carden. Coincidentally, both the captain and the ship were well known to Decatur. Carden and Macedonian had harbored in Norfolk for several weeks in early 1812, while the British frigate was waiting to receive dispatches from the British ambassador in Washington. During Carden’s sojourn in Norfolk, the two men socialized frequently; Carden was a guest of Stephen and Susan Decatur at their home in Norfolk at least twice, and he visited the United States at least once. According to Decatur’s earliest biographer, the two men jokingly waged a beaver hat on the prospective outcome of a battle between their two ships, though the exchange was probably apocryphal. What is known with greater certainty is that Carden had lectured Decatur on the dangers of overarming. Britain’s experience, said Carden, had proven that frigates were more effective when armed with 18-pounder cannon rather than 24-pounders; and Carden added, “When the American officers have had as much experience as we have had, they too will prefer eighteen pounders.”
The crew of the Macedonian were turned out in their best clothes, as was their custom on the Sabbath, including “black, glossy hats, ornamented with black ribbons, and with the name of our ship painted on them.” An easy breeze blew out of the south, inclining into the southeast; the Macedonian was steering northwest by west. The British ship’s lookout sighted the United States at about the same time the American lookout caught sight of the Macedonian. Carden ordered his men to make all sail to windward in chase, and the United States simultaneously altered course to close with the British ship.
Among the crew of the Macedonian were several pressed Americans. When Captain Carden gave the order to clear the ship for action, an American named John Card, not wishing to fight his own countrymen, approached the captain and asked permission to go below. When Captain Dacres of the Guerrière had been approached with a similar request by several American seamen before her engagement with the Constitution, he had complied (and afterward cited the resulting shortfall in manpower as one of the factors in Guerrière’s defeat). Carden was less accommodating. According to a British seaman who claimed to witness the exchange, Carden “very ungenerously ordered [Card] to his quarters, threatening to shoot him if he made the request again.”
At 8:30 a.m., as the two frigates were closing, Macedonian made the private English signals. United States, ignorant of the countercode, answered by hoisting an American ensign at each masthead. A few minutes later, Decatur made an unexpected maneuver. The United States wore round and turned away from the wind. It almost seemed as if she was attempting to flee. As the Macedonian attempted to close the distance between the two ships, the United States kept two points off the wind, and as a result, Carden later reported, “I was not enabled to get as close to her as I could have wished.” In fact, Decatur chose his tactics deliberately. Knowing that his 24-pounder long guns would be more effective at long range than the Englishman’s 18s, he kept the United States in a position to rake the Macedonian as she steered down on the American frigate’s starboard quarter.
At 9:00 a.m., the United States fired a ranging broadside. From the Macedonian, the flash of the cannon was seen before the sound reached their ears. The balls fell well short, splashing down in the sea in a ragged line of white geysers. A few minutes later, Macedonian’s three forward most larboard guns fired at extreme range—long, high-arching shots that also fell short of their target. An English officer shouted: “Cease firing—you are throwing away your shot!”
The two frigates were now sailing together toward the east, both under fighting sail, about three quarters of a mile apart and closing gradually. The United States was leading ahead, but the British ship was clearly faster. As the range closed, Carden gave the order to open fire, and the Macedonian’s larboard battery erupted in a cloud of white smoke. A few of the shots actually passed over the United States and splashed into the sea on the far side.
At 9:20 a.m., with the range closing rapidly, the United States poured out a second broadside. The sound and shock of the guns was so powerful that some of the seamen aboard the Macedonian wrongly concluded that the Americans’ powder magazine had detonated, and gave an abortive cheer. The wind of the 24-pounder cannon balls, said a British sailor, sounded like “the tearing of sails, just over our heads.” Several of the upper deck carronades on the Macedonian’s engaged side were dismounted. The British ship’s mizzen topmast and driver gaff were brought down, giving the United States a sudden advantage in maneuvering, which Decatur acted quickly to exploit. He backed his main topsail, turned hard into the wind, and took up a raking position on the Macedonian’s quarter. The Amer
ican gun crews reloaded and fired as quickly as they could, hardly pausing to aim the weapons. Several balls passed cleanly “through and through” the Macedonian, puncturing both sides of the ship and disappearing into the sea on the far side.
The grisly scene aboard the British ship was described by a literate British seaman, Samuel Leech, in a memoir entitled Thirty Years from Home: Being the Experience of Samuel Leech, Who Was for Six Years in the British and American Navies (1843). The literary conventions of that era typically sanitized the graphic details of war violence for the sake of readers’ sensitivities. Leech’s account was an exception. He prefaces his narrative with an apology, warning that “the recital may be painful,” but insists on recording the carnage aboard the Macedonian to “reveal the horrors of war and show at what a fearful price a victory is won or lost.”
As the United States’s heavy shot smashed through the hull of the Macedonian, “torrents of blood” ran on the deck and “the cries of the wounded rang through all parts of the ship.” One of the men stationed at Leech’s gun was struck in the wrist by a round shot; his hand apparently vanished, with a jet of blood suddenly appearing in its place. A Portuguese boy assigned to carry gunpowder had the bad luck to have a cartridge ignite in his hands. The explosion “burnt the flesh almost off his face. In this pitiable situation, the agonized boy lifted up both hands, as if imploring relief, when a passing shot instantly cut him in two.” Men who were killed outright—and at least one who was alive but thought unlikely to survive—were lifted from the deck and thrown overboard. It was deemed essential to keep the area around the guns clear of bodies.
Leech was amazed at the bravery of his shipmates, who fought stripped to the waist, and cheered as they served the guns. “I cheered with them,” he wrote, “though I confess I scarcely knew for what. Certainly there was nothing very inspiriting in the aspect of things where I was stationed.” Men were falling on every side, including the wardroom steward, the schoolmaster, a midshipman, a lieutenant, and a master’s mate. As one wounded man was carried below, Leech recalled hearing “the large blood-drops fall pat, pat, pat, on the deck; his wounds were mortal.” The boatswain was attempting to secure the backstay when “his head was smashed to pieces by a cannon-ball.” A goat kept by the English officers for milk was struck in the hindquarters—“her hind legs were shot off, and poor Nan was thrown overboard.” The carronades on the spar deck of the United States had been loaded with grape and canister shot, which came “pouring through our port-holes like leaden rain, carrying death in their trail.”
Fifteen minutes after the first American broadside had hit home, the Macedonian’s main topmast “went by the cap”—that is to say, it broke near the point where the topmast was joined to the lower mast. It fell forward, into the fore topmast, and both came down together, covering the forecastle in a hopeless thicket of cordage and spars. The British ship’s remaining rigging hung uselessly from the shreds of her lower masts. She would no longer answer her helm. Her hull had been punctured nearly a hundred times, and many of her guns lay dismounted on the deck.
The British officers attempted to organize a boarding party. A cluster of men gathered on the gangway, armed with cutlasses and pikes. Other teams were sent with hatchets to clear away the wreckage and heave it overboard. Before much progress could be made in clearing a path to the forecastle, however, the mizzenmast came down “by the board” (just above deck-level), dragging wreckage behind it, and leaving nothing standing except the stumps of the lower foremast and mainmast, and no sails drawing wind except a tattered foresail.
The United States crossed the Macedonian’s bow and sailed a short distance to windward. She hove to, and the American crew was set to knotting and splicing the minor damage she had sustained in her standing and running rigging. The British officers ordered the gun crews to cease fire. As the silence fell, the “stifled groans” of the wounded suddenly became audible. About fifteen minutes later, the United States filled her sails and ran back down to the stricken Macedonian, taking up a raking position just off her larboard quarter.
The Macedonian was a hulk, wallowing helplessly on the waves, rolling her gunports under the sea. All of her boats but one—the jolly boat, which had been towing astern—had been smashed to splinters. The decks were literally covered with dead and dying men—she had thirty-six killed and sixty-eight wounded. The Macedonian, said Carden, was “a perfect wreck, an unmanageable Log.”
The surviving officers huddled briefly on the quarterdeck. The first lieutenant recommended that the Macedonian fight on and “sink alongside,” if necessary, but Captain Carden decided that he had no choice but to surrender. The colors were hauled down. “To me it was a pleasing sight,” wrote Leech, “for I had seen fighting enough for one Sabbath; more than I wished to see again on a week day.”
A boat was lowered from the United States and a prize crew came across to take possession of the surrendered frigate. “Fragments of the dead were distributed in every direction,” one of the American officers said; “the decks covered with blood, one continued agonizing yell of the unhappy wounded; a scene so horrible of my fellow-creatures, I assure you, deprived me very much of the pleasure of victory.” Below, the Macedonian’s surgeon and his mates were doing their best to cope with the wounded. Because the cockpit was too small to accommodate all of the casualties, the long dining table in the officers’ wardroom was converted into an operating table, “covered with the bleeding forms of maimed and mutilated seamen.” After each amputation, one of the mates would carry the severed limb to a gunport and heave it into the sea. Leech was appalled by the cries of the wounded men: “Some were groaning, others were swearing most bitterly, a few were praying, while those last arrived were begging most piteously to have their wounds dressed next.”
There was a near-complete breakdown in discipline aboard the shattered frigate. Several seamen broke into the spirit room and began drinking heavily. Others looted the pursuers’ storeroom, or the officers’ possessions, or stripped the dead of their clothing and personal possessions. A few threatened to attack members of the American prize crew. Leech was surprised at how differently his surviving shipmates reacted to the trauma of defeat—“some who had lost their messmates appeared to care nothing about it, while others were grieving with all the tenderness of women.”
According to a report later published in the Niles’ Register, one of the pressed Americans among the Macedonian’s crew—possibly John Card, the man whose request to be excused from the fight had been denied by Captain Carden—had been struck in the head by a round shot during the battle, “and his brains and blood dashed against a beam and the spar deck of the ship.” When the dead man’s surviving messmates pointed out his remains, several members of the American prize crew gathered up fragments of his skull “and swore they would preserve the precious relic to the end of their lives, as a stimulus to avenge the death of their brother on the despoilers of the ocean.”
As Captain Carden came aboard the United States, Captain Decatur was there to greet him. The two captains knew each other well, and each was conscious of the role he was meant to play. Carden offered his sword to Decatur in token of surrender, and Decatur refused it. Thinking himself the first officer to surrender a British frigate to the Americans, Carden remarked, sadly, that he was an “undone man.” Decatur eased Carden’s mind, or disturbed it further, by advising him of the capture of the Guerrière by the Constitution two months earlier.
The United States was barely scratched. She had suffered superficial damage to her rigging and shrouds, and only nine shots in her hull. She had five men killed and seven wounded. The disparity in casualties was even more dramatic than that of the Constitution-Guerrière action, and offered further vindication of Joshua Humphreys’s insistence on unconventionally heavy live oak framing.
Decatur was determined to bring the captured frigate safely into an American port. He placed Lieutenant William Allen in command of her. A large contingent of seamen from the
United States, assisted by a number of the British prisoners, pumped seven feet of water out of her hold and plugged dozens of shot holes in her hull. Decatur vetoed a proposal to throw the Macedonian’s guns overboard. With the hull repaired sufficiently for the voyage back to the North American coast, the Macedonian was jury-rigged with new topmasts, spare yards, and cordage removed from the storerooms of the United States. The work required a full two weeks.
“One half of the satisfaction arising from this victory is destroyed in seeing the distress of poor Carden,” Decatur wrote his wife during the passage back to America. “I do all I can to console him.” All of the English officers’ personal possessions were saved and returned to them, and to compensate Carden for articles that he did not wish to take with him back to England, including casks of wine and some of the musicians’ instruments, Decatur gave him $800. In his memoirs Carden would write: “I must here & always bear testimony to the marked Gentlemanly Conduct of Commodore Decatur.”
The nickname “Old Wagon” was confirmed when the jury-rigged and hull-patched Macedonian consistently outsailed the United States. The prize often had to reduce sail in order to remain in company with her captor. It was thought likely that British frigates and battleships would be patrolling the American coast in force. Samuel Leech said that a majority of the Macedonian’s common seamen “sincerely wished to avoid” recapture, but the English officers felt differently, and they studied the horizon eagerly, day after day. “I was always alive to the chance that some of our Cruisers might Cross our Course to the Enemies Port & recapture the Macedonian,” Captain Carden later wrote, “—But NO!—We were nearly one Month on the American Coast, & never saw a British cruiser.”
