by Ian W. Toll
An end to impressment was now the sole American condition to an armistice, but the British government continued to insist that impressment was a right it would never yield. In February 1813, Congress enacted a law designed to ease the way to negotiations on the question, by forbidding the employment of any foreign citizen on board any American vessel, to take effect at the end of the war. There were as many at ten thousand British seamen employed on American merchantmen, privateers, and naval vessels. The law, if enforced, would result in the discharge of these seamen, who would then have little choice but to return to service on British ships. They would almost certainly exceed the number of impressed Americans in the Royal Navy. On its face, the law seemed to offer England a powerful incentive to negotiate an end to the war.
As early as the fall of 1812, Tsar Alexander of Russia had approached the U.S. minister at St. Petersburg, John Quincy Adams, with an offer to mediate Anglo-American peace talks. The offer reached the American capital about the same time as the first reports of Napoleon’s catastrophic defeat in Russia. Madison leapt at the offer, and nominated a three-headed peace commission comprised of Albert Gallatin (who was eager to conclude his twelve-year tenure at the Treasury Department by any means possible), James Bayard of Delaware, and John Quincy Adams, who would await the arrival of his two colleagues in Russia. Only after Gallatin and Bayard had sailed for St. Petersburg did word arrive in America that the British government had rejected the Russian offer. The Admiralty reminded Admiral Warren, on May 17, 1813, that he had no authority “to enter into any Negotiation, or to defer or relax your measures of hostility on the proposition from the Russian Minister, or from the American Government.”
CAPTAIN CHARLES STEWART, one of the many veterans of Preble’s Mediterranean tour who had risen through the ranks since the end of the Tripolitan War, experienced all the usual difficulties in preparing the Constellation for sea—a shortage of adequate supplies and maritime artisans at the Washington Navy Yard, and a dearth of prime seamen, many of whom had shipped out on privateers. Following a time-honored tradition, he sailed from Washington short-handed and only partly provisioned, expecting to find what he needed at ports closer to the sea. Navigating into the Chesapeake and up to Annapolis, Constellation completed her manning and stores. On the first day of February 1813, in bitter winter weather, with the ice making fast in the harbor, she hove up her anchor and sailed for Hampton Roads, where she would pause only briefly before putting to sea.
Three days later, doubling Old Point Comfort and Willoughby Bay, just north of Hampton Roads, Stewart and his crew were shocked to come face-to-face with a powerful British squadron, comprising two ships of the line, three frigates, a brig, and a schooner. They were well inside Cape Henry, between the Middle Ground and Horseshoe shoals, just out of cannon-shot range, and beating into a headwind toward Hampton Roads. The route to the open sea was obstructed, and Stewart was forced to decide in an instant how the Constellation would make her escape. He could turn into the wind and sail back up the bay, or he could turn into Hampton Roads and run in under the protecting guns of Fort Norfolk. He chose Norfolk. With the wind failing, he ordered the boats hoisted out and kedge anchors run ahead, but as the tide ran out the Constellation ran soft aground on the mudflats. To lighten her, Stewart ordered the fresh water pumped out and the hands sent below to turn out the provisions. With the help of small civilian vessels and the evening tide, Constellation was lightened, floated, and brought up the narrows to the relative safety of Norfolk. The British squadron, lacking a local pilot and wary of running aground, dropped back down the Roads and anchored in Lynnhaven Bay.
Admiral George Cockburn (pronounced “Coburn”), Admiral Warren’s second-in-command on the North American Station, arrived in the 74-gun Marlborough with three other vessels to reinforce the advance squadron on March 3. Cockburn was wary of Norfolk’s shore defenses, and chose not to attempt an immediate assault on the Constellation or the city. Instead, he sent two frigates to anchor off Newport News, near the mouth of the James River, where they could take soundings, buoy the channels, and stage raids into the inland waterways, while also plundering the river traffic. With the exception of scattered resistance by the local militias, Americans had no effective means of repelling these raids. Nineteen days later, Admiral Warren’s flagship, the 74-gun San Domingo, dropped anchor in Lynnhaven Bay, accompanied by another ship of the line and a frigate. The Royal Navy’s local strength now amounted to four battleships, five frigates, two sloops, two brigs, and three tenders, completing the transformation of the lower Chesapeake Bay into a major British naval base.
Chesapeake Bay offered a seemingly infinite number of rich, vulnerable targets; but since English public opinion had demanded, above all, the capture or destruction of the hated American frigates, Captain Stewart assumed an attack on the Constellation must come. “I am persuaded they intend something more than a blockade in this quarter,” he told Jones. He was concerned by the primitive conditions of Norfolk’s defenses. The Gosport Navy Yard did not include enough buildings, barracks, or storehouses, and much of the local weaponry, ammunition, and naval stores were obliged to be left out under the weather. The hospital had originally been set up in a room directly upstairs from the commandant’s small office, and Commandant John Cassin complained that “whenever they wash it the water runs all over me, books & everything.” Several ancient hulks were sunk in the Elizabeth River’s main channel, between Craney Island and Lambert’s Point, to obstruct navigation. Stewart found ten of Norfolk’s twenty-odd gunboats in service, but they were “so weakly manned and so utterly incompetent to protect themselves” that he ordered them withdrawn up the river, under the guns of Fort Norfolk.
Throughout February and early March, Stewart kept the Constellation ready to sail on a moment’s notice, hoping for an opportunity to escape past the British squadron into the open sea. On March 9, he maneuvered the ship down the river as far as the bight of Craney Island. The next morning, three British battleships and two frigates kedged up into Hampton Roads, nearly within cannon-shot range. In the face of such an overwhelming force, Stewart took the Constellation back upriver and moored her permanently in the channel between Norfolk and Portsmouth. “I am getting out of the Ship all the Stores, Sails, Spars, etc and sending them up the Elizabeth river,” he told Jones on March 17, “as it is now reduced to a certainty that this ship will not have an opportunity of getting to sea.”
Norfolk’s civilians piled their belongings into wagons and fled to the relative safety of inland Virginia. The road from Norfolk to Richmond was jammed with carts, wagons, horses, and people on foot, and committees were formed in Richmond and Petersburg to provide them with food and shelter. Intermingled with the refugees were a considerable number of young men who had deserted from the local militia companies. British raids up the James and Nansemond Rivers resulted in a large number of captures of rivercraft, and navigation became so dangerous that the daily mail boat which normally crossed from Hampton to Norfolk was dragged up onto the beach, and regular deliveries of mail to Norfolk ceased. The newspapers quoted the British commanders as having threatened an attack on Constellation, and boasting that no defensive measures would withstand the impending assault.
In response to urgent requests for reinforcements, Navy Secretary Jones candidly replied that Stewart would have to “make the best use of the means you possess, and increase them by all the resources within your vicinity.” The entire American coastline was vulnerable, Jones wrote, and there were a “number of places not less exposed than Norfolk, and with much less protection.” He urged Stewart to feel consoled by the knowledge that “while a strong squadron of the enemies Ships are employed in watching your little squadron…our gallant commanders are scouring the ocean in search of a superior foe.”
The battleships and frigates of the British squadron remained, for the most part, in Lynnhaven Bay, exactly where the HMS Leopard had lain in wait for the Chesapeake in June 1807. They anchored in tight format
ion, within hailing distance of one another. Coastal raids were carried out by launches, each manned with twenty-five to thirty men and armed with a swivel-mounted howitzer. In fair weather, these launches traveled as far as ten or fifteen miles up the bay or rivers, landing at unprotected points on the shore, seizing shad boats, oyster boats, skiffs, smacks and river barges, and returning to the squadron by nightfall. The Cape Henry Lighthouse was raided, the terrified keeper robbed of his hams, mince pies, and sausages, and a nearby windmill burned to the ground. “Notice Is Hereby Given,” proclaimed a Treasury Department circular signed by Albert Gallatin, “That the lights of the light-house on Cape Henry, and also of all the other light-houses in the Chesapeake, will be immediately extinguished.”
Local newspapers carried sarcastic reports of the British raids. When a party of Royal Marines landed at an isolated farm on the Nansemond River, finding no one but an elderly black woman at home, the Norfolk Herald gleefully reported the encounter:
The marines being most accustomed to that kind of warfare, were sent round to the rear of the house by a private avenue, under an officer of great experience, to surprize the henhouse; another party composed of the most resolute spirits were ordered to storm a neighboring pig-sty, and the third, being the remaining disposable force, headed by the commander in chief, proceeded to sack the dairy and smokehouse. The arrangement was excellent, but unfortunately the marines, by omitting to send out an advance guard, were surprised while defiling through a narrow pass, by a flock of turkeys, who charged them furiously in flank and rear. After a sharp engagement of near half an hour, however, the assailants were either killed, taken prisoner, or put to flight; without the smallest injury to his majesty’s troops…. [The] turkeys having been defeated, the hen-roosts were taken possession of; the pig-sty was carried after a slight resistance, the storehouses were sacked, and the whole of the forces retreated in excellent order, laden with spoil, and without the loss of a man!
In the first week of April, Admirals Warren and Cockburn took the better part of the British fleet up the bay, leaving a small but still superior force to prevent the escape of the Constellation. The Chesapeake and its tributaries formed a vast inland sea, with hundreds of miles of completely undefended coastline. Anchoring the large ships at the mouth of the Rappahannock, the admirals sent a flotilla of launches fifteen miles upriver, where they attacked and captured four armed schooners. The captured vessels, disguised as common Yankee traders, managed to approach and capture dozens more unsuspecting schooners, barges, and pilot boats, and the list of British prizes grew to more than forty vessels. As the Chesapeake was an essential link in the internal trade and communication of the United States, the interruption of traffic caused immediate shortages of foodstuffs and other goods in the cities and towns throughout the mid-Atlantic region, including Washington.
Continuing up the bay, the fleet arrived at the mouth of the Patapsco on April 22. Warren remained with the main force, threatening an attack on Baltimore, while Cockburn took two frigates and six smaller vessels to the Chesapeake’s shallow northern extremity, with orders to destroy anything resembling an article of war. He anchored at the mouth of the Susquehanna River and dispatched raiding parties on shore to seize provisions. British troops destroyed the Cecil Foundry, near the Elk River, where many of the cannon for the American frigates had been cast. The Maryland militia was unprepared, underarmed, and inexperienced, with command divided between the eastern and western shores of the Chesapeake. With embarrassing regularity, they broke and ran whenever the enemy landed.
When the American townspeople capitulated without resistance, the British raiding parties generally left their houses and barns alone. Admiral Cockburn offered to pay for the cattle and pigs and crops seized in the raids, albeit in bills of exchange which would have to be submitted to the British government at some indefinite point after the end of the war. But when shots were fired at the British raiding parties, Cockburn authorized reprisals. It was on this pretext that the British destroyed Georgetown and Frederick-town on the eastern shore, and to several generations of Tidewater Marylanders, Admiral Cockburn’s name would be remembered with the same loathing that General Sherman’s name was later remembered by the people of Georgia.
On May 3, before dawn, nineteen barges landed a party of several hundred seamen and marines near Havre de Grace, Maryland, the hometown of Commodore John Rodgers, who was at that moment cruising the North Atlantic in President. After the local militia made a halfhearted stand, the civilians of the town paid a heavy price. The British set up a battery of fieldpieces within range of the town and opened up a vicious barrage of shells and rockets, driving the inhabitants in a panic from their homes. Niles’ reported: “Many fled from their burning houses almost in a state of nudity, carrying in their arms their children, clothing, etc.” A party of Royal Marines set torches to the abandoned houses and some of the wagons carrying the personal possessions of the fleeing refugees. Two hours of work leveled almost every building in the area. A detachment was sent with special orders to pillage Commodore Rodgers’s house. Brushing aside the tearful pleas of his family, they carried away several of his personal possessions, including a carriage and a pianoforte, but left the manorhouse standing as a professional courtesy to the commodore. Having completed the mission, they retreated to their barges.
Rejoining Warren and the main squadron in the first week of May, Cockburn reported that most of the remaining towns in the upper Chesapeake had capitulated, and that the raids had left “neither public property, vessels, not warlike stores remaining in this neighborhood.” In a little over a week, without losing a man, Cockburn’s small force had spread terror throughout the entire region. The British had made an important point: with their overwhelming naval superiority, they could descend on any cape, spit, beach, or riverbank they chose, looting and destroying as they pleased, and there was very little the Americans could do to stop them.
The greatest problem faced by the British in carrying out these coastal raids arose within their own ranks. Many of the enlisted men attempted to desert as soon as they set foot on American soil. They were generally welcomed by the local inhabitants as English-speaking cousins escaping the tyranny of a common enemy. Early in April, according to a Baltimore newspaper, thirty to fifty seamen had recently escaped the British squadron, and six weeks later Captain Stewart reported that deserters were still “coming up to Norfolk almost daily.” When the seamen and marines were not permitted to go ashore, they sometimes escaped by stealing a boat, and many British launches went over to the enemy. As the weather grew warmer in late spring, men took the risk of swimming to freedom. British sailors’ “naked bodies are frequently fished up on the bay shore,” Stewart told the Navy Office, “where they must have been drowned on attempting to swim.”
Admirals Warren and Cockburn brought the squadron back down the bay on May 12. Fifteen warships anchored in a formidable line extending from Willoughby’s Point to Cape Henry, and Norfolk braced itself for an attack. But on the seventeenth, Admiral Warren sailed for Halifax with forty prizes, and Captain Robert Barrie in the Dragon sailed for Bermuda with thirty more. The safe disposition of these captured vessels was a priority that every man in the fleet could agree upon, since every man in the fleet would receive a share, however small, of the prize money. (One of Warren’s fellow admirals, Sir David Milne, told a correspondent that Warren had taken John Rodgers’s looted pianoforte to his house in Bermuda, and had been seen riding around Halifax in Rodgers’s carriage. “What do you think of a British Admiral and Commander-in-Chief?” asked Admiral Milne, in disgust. “This is not the way to conquer America.”) Cockburn, left in command of the remaining ships at Lynnhaven Bay, maintained the blockade and kept his forces busy in sounding and buoying the channel up to Norfolk.
Captain Stewart had orders from the Navy Office to travel overland to Boston, where he would assume command of the Constitution, but he was reluctant to leave at such a critical moment, and Secretary Jones
agreed to allow him to delay his departure. At last, substantial numbers of militia reinforcements were streaming into Norfolk from the inland country: the “Henrico Rifles,” the Albemarle cavalry, and the “Petersburg Blues,” united under the command of Brigadier General Robert Taylor. Defensive breastworks were thrown up at Lambert’s Point, Tanner’s Creek, and Princess Anne Road. Taylor and Stewart agreed that the essential point of defense was Craney Island, a low-lying scrap of scrub and dune at the mouth of the Elizabeth River, connected to the western shore by a footbridge. General Taylor sent five hundred troops to the island to erect a blockhouse and two redoubts, and Stewart stationed seven gun boats in the mouth of the river. Constellation remained five miles upriver, moored in the river off the Gosport Navy Yard, with boarding netting rigged above her bulwarks. A large portion of her crew, about 150 seamen and marines, were sent to man the guns on Craney Island. A resident of Norfolk observed that “the utmost vigilance pervaded this body of men; they scarcely closed an eye during the night.” The army and navy were for once working in harmony—officers of both services agreed that if the island fell, so would the Constellation, so would the Navy Yard, and so would Norfolk.
Admiral Warren and the San Domingo returned to Lynnhaven Bay on June 19, escorting six troop transports carrying an expeditionary force of about 2,200 infantrymen and Royal Marines. Lord Bathurst had dispatched this force to America “to effect a diversion on the Coasts of the United States of America,” in the hope of forcing Madison to transfer American troops from the thinly defended Canadian border to the south. Colonel Sir Thomas Sidney Beckwith, who had served with distinction under Wellington in Spain and Portugal, commanded the troops. Among them were two companies of Chasseurs Britanniques, comprising about 250 French prisoners who had agreed to join the British army rather than sit out the rest of the war in prison. These Frenchmen were less than happy to be serving in the British Army, and among them were a number of very dangerous men—Beckwith would later describe them as “a desperate Banditti, impossible to control.”
