by Ian W. Toll
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In the early weeks of the war, ex-President Jefferson had assured the Republican editor William Duane that an invasion of Canada, with a population about one tenth that of the United States, would be “a mere matter of marching.” General Hull’s abject surrender at Detroit had followed nine days later. Two subsequent invasion attempts had been turned back in the fall; and by the spring of 1813, Americans had reason to fear being invaded in turn. John Adams, observing events from his retirement in Quincy, had given Jefferson his opinion that the only sure means of securing the northern frontier was to win naval supremacy on the Great Lakes, particularly Ontario and Erie: “We must have a Navy now to command The Lakes, if it costs Us 100 Ships of the Line; whatever becomes of the Ocean.”
Men, money, ordnance, munitions, shipwrights, and naval stores flowed north. Blockaded American frigates, including the Constellation at Norfolk, Macedonian and United States at New London, and Constitution at Boston, were stripped of much of their crews, and the men sent to report for duty at Sackets’ Harbor, on Lake Ontario. Captain Isaac Chauncey was removed from his command of the New York Navy Yard and placed in command of America’s freshwater naval forces on Lakes Ontario and Erie. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry supervised a crash shipbuilding program in the remote wilderness of Presque Isle, Pennsylvania (present-day Erie), and with this hastily constructed array of small brigs and schooners, he engaged and annihilated the British Lake Erie Squadron on September 10. His flagship, the Lawrence, sailed into action flying a banner inscribed with the fallen captain’s last words: “Don’t Give Up the Ship.” In his official letter reporting the result of the battle, Perry coined an equally memorable phrase, destined to be taken up as another of the navy’s slogans: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” A month later, American militia and army forces defeated a combined British and Indian army at the Battle of Thames, in which Tecumseh, the great Shawnee chief, was killed in action. The battles of Lake Erie and the Thames ruled out any British invasion from that part of Canada. Equally important was the effect on the American people’s perceptions and morale. The victories rallied public support for the war at a moment when it had seemed on the verge of unraveling.
The tightening grip of the British blockade was beginning to take a severe economic toll on communities throughout the country. The drain on the treasury remained a pressing concern, and the Republican-dominated Congress finally recognized the need for more tax revenue; a new levy fell on licenses, carriages, auctions, sugar refineries, and salt. Admiral Warren’s forces, unfazed by the bloody repulse at Craney Island, continued to roam the Chesapeake at will. “Strong is my dislike to what is perhaps a necessary part of our job: namely, plundering and ruining the peasantry,” Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Napier wrote in his diary. “We drive all their cattle, and of course ruin them. My hands are clean; but it is hateful to see the poor Yankees robbed, and to be the robber.” In mid-July, reports arrived in Washington that a squadron of enemy battleships and frigates was steering a course up the Potomac River, threatening to attack the capital itself. The city prepared to flee. For a month, Madison had been bedridden at the White House with a dangerous bout of influenza. His doctors could not say whether the commander in chief would survive, and he was in no condition to be moved. As it happened, the British ships did not ascend the river beyond the Kettle Bottoms, but they sent boats ahead to take soundings and learn the channel for a potential future operation. After it was confirmed that the enemy had returned to the bay, Secretary of War John Armstrong reassured the capital’s flustered inhabitants that his defensive preparations were sufficient to repel any future British attack.
On September 26, 1813, Commodore Rodgers and USS President returned safely from a five month cruise, putting in at Newport, Rhode Island. Parting ways with Congress shortly after escaping Boston in early May, President had probed as far south as the Azores, turned back to the north and harassed British whalers through the North Sea (where the sun appeared “at midnight several degrees above the Horrison”), replenished her fresh water at Bergen on the Norwegian coast, cruised with impunity in the waters around the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the northern Irish Channel, and then passed through the crowded sea-lanes of the western approaches before shaping a course for home. Returning to the North American coast, President eluded the British cordon by threading the shoals of the rarely used Tuckernuck passage between Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. She had taken twelve enemy prizes, including the schooner HMS High Flyer, Admiral Warren’s personal tender (some had been destroyed, others sent into port earlier manned by prize crews). In the final weeks of her long cruise, the frigate’s large crew subsisted on reduced rations “of the roughest fare.” Though the sailors were “in better health than might be expected,” Rodgers told Jones, “you may well suppose that their scanty allowance has not been of any advantage to their Strength or appearance.”
Rodgers expressed disappointment at not having fallen in with an enemy warship, but in fact the President had accomplished a great deal. Reports of her whereabouts—often conflicting—filled the British newspapers, and her presence in the offing spread fear and uncertainty. The Admiralty was subjected to withering criticism for its failure to hunt down the “successful marauder” (Naval Chronicle), and the specter of an American frigate cruising openly in Britain’s home waters dramatized the threat to British commerce. The cruise won John Rodgers a notoriety among Englishmen greater than that enjoyed by any of his colleagues—even those, like Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge, who had taken a British frigate. Secretary Jones congratulated Rodgers on an “active, vigilant, and useful Cruize.” The Admiralty had been forced to deploy a great deal of force in the search for President, while the cost to British shipping would be felt, once again, in the all-important calculation of maritime insurance. Jones had asked for a war against British commerce, and Rodgers had delivered it.
On December 14, the Congress came to anchor in the outer harbor of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had been out nearly eight months, one of the longest cruises of the war. Captain John Smith was embarrassed to report that the Congress had managed to capture only four enemy vessels in all her time at sea. The value of these four prizes would not equal the cost of keeping the Congress at sea for such a great length of time. It had been the least profitable cruise of the war. Secretary Jones wanted the frigate refitted and reprovisioned for another cruise as soon as possible, but close inspection revealed that her timbers were decayed, her bowsprit was shot, her lower rigging required a complete overhaul, and the entire deck and hull need recaulking. As Congress was dismantled at the Portsmouth Navy Yard wharf, a short distance from the stocks on which she had been built, the shipwrights grew increasingly pessimistic about her condition. With the instinctive parsimony of a veteran shipowner, Jones ordered the Congress laid up in ordinary and her guns hauled overland to Lake Ontario.
“HERE WE ARE,” wrote Stephen Decatur from New London, “John Bull and us, all of a lump.” Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy, the HMS Ramillies, and the rest of the British blockaders seemed content to remain anchored in the lee of Fishers Island indefinitely, keeping the frigates United States and Macedonian imprisoned in the Thames River. To Decatur’s chagrin, the people of New London did not seem inclined to rally to the defense of the blockaded American squadron. Connecticut was Federalist territory, and “Mr. Madison’s War” was deeply unpopular. There was growing pro-British sentiment in the region, and Decatur suspected that disloyal locals were passing vital intelligence to the British. The presence of the United States, with Macedonian and Hornet, ensured that the port would remain closely blockaded, interrupting the coastal trade and severely penalizing New London’s maritime economy. It was generally believed that the British planned to attack upriver and would probably destroy the town. “A desperate engagement may be hourly looked for,” reported a local paper.
Reports of the behavior of Admiral Cockburn’s forces in the Chesapeake had terrified local ci
vilians, but Captain Hardy, who had served as Nelson’s flag captain at Trafalgar, did not intend to allow the kind of pillaging that had occurred to the south. He conveyed a message to the people of New London, through the local customs inspector, “to assure the ladies that they may rely on his honor, that not a shot should be fired at any dwelling (at least while he had the command) unless he should receive very positive orders for that purpose, which he had not the most distant idea would be received.” The message calmed fears considerably, and also did a great deal to confirm and enhance pro-British sentiment in Connecticut. Hardy’s candid promises to the civilians of New London stood in welcome contrast to the evasive answers given by Colonel Beckwith after the sack of Hampton. “On the whole,” observed the Niles’ Register, a newspaper hardly known for pro-British sentiment, “Hardy must be a noble fellow.”
With several American seaports now strongly blockaded, leaders in Washington took an interest in weapons innovations that might alter the balance of power. In March 1813, Congress passed the so-called Torpedo Act, which made it lawful for “any person or persons to burn, sink or destroy any British armed vessels of war…and for that purpose to use torpedoes, submarine instruments, or any other destructive machines whatever.” (At that time, the term “torpedo” referred to a wide array of spar-mounted weapons, undersea devices, and both fixed and floating mines.) Any American, civilian or military, who managed to sink an enemy warship by such means would be paid a federal bounty equivalent to half the value of the vessel destroyed. In the case of a frigate or battleship, the bounty could easily exceed $100,000, a fantastic sum. All up and down the Atlantic seaboard, entrepreneurs and inventers turned their minds to the challenge.
One of the best-known weapons innovators of the day was Robert Fulton, a failed portrait artist whose work in steam engine propulsion was only one of many interests. Fulton had hawked his inventions in London, Paris, and other European capitals before returning to the United States in 1805. In lobbying the Navy Office to fund his torpedo experiments, Fulton avowed that “every Physical operation which is not contrary or at Varience with the laws of nature is practicable for man to perform…[and] torpedoes with practice must succeed, for there is no Physical impossibility to prevent it.” When Fulton dismissed objections that his torpedoes were dishonorable, his opinions, like his inventions, foreshadowed a very different kind of future:
[I]s war confined within the limits of honor? The British, by pressing American Citizens and compelling them to fight against their Brethren, have not consulted Honor, the Laws of Nations, or humanity, but simply their own convenience or caprice. Everything in these times to weaken the enemy and defeat them on our coast is Right, and for War sufficiently Honorable.
In April 1813, Secretary Jones agreed to lend Fulton a fireship for torpedo experiments in New York, on the condition that the navy would “incur no expense whatever on account of these experiments.” Fulton demonstrated that a 100-pound projectile could be fired underwater with enough force to pass through a three-foot oak plank at a range of six feet. Master Commandant Jacob Lewis, charged with monitoring Fulton’s experiments in New York, was enthusiastic. If a submerged weapon could be maneuvered to within point-blank range of an anchored British warship, it seemed possible she could be sunk. “I think submarine Batteries can be turned to a good Account,” he concluded.
In the Chesapeake, a naval petty officer named Elijah Mix conceived a plan to destroy some of the vessels of Admiral Warren’s fleet by towing a floating mine or “powder machine” to the enemy’s anchorage and cutting it loose. The mine would be allowed to drift down on an anchored vessel, where it would explode on impact. On June 5, in Lynnhaven Bay, the boats of the HMS Victorious picked up one of these “infernal Machines,” crammed with 500 pounds of gunpowder, as it was drifting down on the British ship with the ebb tide. Admiral Cockburn, who had already demonstrated that he had limited scruples in interpreting the rules of war, was nevertheless outraged by this attempt to “dispose of us by wholesale Six Hundred at a time,” and warned the other British commanders to watch for unidentified floating objects. On July 24, another of Mix’s floating mines approached the HMS Plantagenet, but detonated prematurely at a range of 100 yards, throwing up “an immense column of flame” and raining a cascade of water down on the battleship’s deck. No one was injured. The Naval Chronicle reported: “Our blockading ships on the coast have kept the most sharp look-out, in their guard-boats, since this infernal attempt was made.”
A group of New York merchants devised a more insidious attack. Why not booby-trap a coasting vessel with explosives, allow her to be captured, and rig her to explode when brought alongside an enemy warship? A schooner, the Eagle, was crammed with black powder and “a great Quantity of Combustibles,” hidden under a cargo of provisions and naval stores. A trip line was secured to the bottom of one of the casks, so that when it was lifted from the hold it would trigger a gun-lock and set off an explosion large enough to destroy both the booby-trapped schooner and any large ship lying alongside.
On the morning of June 25, the Eagle, appearing like any number of other common coasting schooners, was seen approaching New London in a failing breeze. Captain Hardy sent a master’s mate with a party of seamen in the Ramillies’s barges to go after her. The Eagle’s crew fired a few shots at their pursuers and then fled for shore in a small boat. Hardy, perhaps suspecting something was amiss, ordered the captured vessel anchored some distance from the Ramillies, and sent a boarding crew under the command of a lieutenant to unload her provisions into the Ramillies’s boats. At 2:00 p.m., one of the boarding party tripped the lock-line and the Eagle “blew up with a most tremendous explosion.” The lieutenant and ten seamen were killed instantly, and three others were “Much Scorched in the Face, Arms, & Legs.”
The British were enraged. Admiral Warren called it “a Diabolical and Cowardly contrivance of the Enemy.” The Naval Chronicle said the men responsible for the scheme were “held in detestation by every friend of humanity.” But there were also expressions of relief that the explosion had not killed Hardy, who was held in special reverence by the British public because of his connection to Nelson. Orders went out from Halifax requiring every British man-of-war on the American coast to search every strange vessel at a distance before bringing her alongside.
Two months later, an American operating a primitive, one-man submarine attempted to attach an explosive device directly to the hull of the Ramillies. The attempt failed, but served to elevate tensions even further. Now Hardy was reluctant to keep the Ramillies at anchor anywhere near the shore, and had her bottom swept with a cable at regular intervals. He took American prisoners aboard, ensuring that they would share the ship’s fate should any of the American attacks succeed. He also let it be known that, notwithstanding his earlier pledge, he would retaliate against any coastal town suspected of planning such attacks against the British squadron. When he received warning that a new attempt was being planned by a civilian resident of East Hampton, New York, Hardy sent a party of armed men to seize the man in his home and bring him aboard the Ramillies, where he was kept in iron manacles. Upon learning what Hardy had done, President Madison ordered a British prisoner of war selected at random to be put into “the same state of degradation & suffering.”
The “Torpedo War” never fulfilled its sponsors’ hopes, but it did serve to embitter the conflict considerably. The British charged the Americans with practicing an unprecedented, inhumane, and cowardly mode of warfare; the Americans retorted that the British had no right to take a tone of moral superiority while forcing abducted American seamen to serve in their ships. The case of Hiram Thayer dramatized the injustice of impressment in a way that resonated powerfully with the public. Thayer was a U.S. citizen, born and raised in Massachusetts, who had been pressed into the Royal Navy in 1802. In the summer of 1813 he was serving as a boatswain’s mate aboard one of the ships of Hardy’s squadron, the 46-gun frigate Statira. Upon first learning of the American dec
laration of war, Thayer had approached the Statira’s captain, Hassard Stackpoole, and asked to be relieved of duty. Stackpoole refused, reportedly telling him: “If we fall in with an American man-of-war, and you do not do your duty, you shall be tied to the mast to be shot at like a dog.”
Thayer’s father was John Thayer, a Massachusetts farmer. When he heard that the Statira was off New London, the elder Thayer asked Commodore Decatur to provide him with a vessel under a flag of truce. Decatur assented. As the boat approached the Statira, the long-separated father and son caught sight of each other and both burst into tears of joy. In Decatur’s words: “The son descried his father at a distance in the boat, and told the first lieutenant of the Statira that it was his father; and I understand the feelings manifested by the old man, on receiving the hand of his son, proved, beyond all other evidence, the property he had in him.” The tearful reunion left no doubt that Hiram Thayer was, as he had always claimed, a Massachusetts-born citizen of the United States—but Captain Stackpoole would not release him, or even treat him as a prisoner of war. (Thayer eventually won his release, after the case was elevated to diplomatic channels.)
Month after month, the United States and her consorts swung uselessly on their moorings in the Thames. Decatur had hoped that Hardy’s squadron would withdraw from Long Island Sound as winter approached, but there was every sign that the British were planning to remain through the season. The American squadron dropped downriver to a new anchorage just off New London and began taking on provisions and water for a long cruise, hoping to make a dash for the open sea on a dark, dirty night when the wind was blowing hard offshore. But Decatur’s first attempt to sail, a week before Christmas, was apparently foiled by local spies. Two blue lights were burned, one on either side of the river, appearing to broadcast signals to the British squadron in the Sound. In a letter to the Navy Office on December 20, afterward distributed to the newspapers, Decatur charged that traitors living in and around New London were conspiring to deliver the United States, Macedonian, and Hornet into enemy hands.
