Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  The postwar economic surge was immediate and gratifying. Prices of stocks and government bonds shot up. Exportable produce, which had been all but worthless in the closing stages of the war, was suddenly in demand, and prices rose accordingly. Ships were fitted out in the harbors, preparing to sail for foreign markets. Imported manufactured goods and commodities, which had been scarce and expensive during the war, were suddenly cheap and abundant. Cotton and tea fell by more than 50 percent; tin by more than 60 percent. From a near standstill in the last year of the war, trade was quickly restored to levels approaching those of 1811, the last year of peace. The total net tonnage capacity of vessels entering American ports rose from 108,000 tons in 1814 to 918,000 tons in 1815; exports rose more than sevenfold, from $7 million in 1814 to $53 million in 1815. British forces withdrew from occupied territories on the northern border and from Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake. The British officers had the honor and good sense to disregard that part of the treaty requiring them to return runaway slaves to their American masters: many were allowed to settle as free citizens of the Maritime Provinces.

  Federalist newspapers attacked the Republicans for having plunged the nation into a ludicrous and costly war. The Boston Gazette admitted that the “whole population devoted itself to expressions of joy,” but a week later printed the names of all the congressmen who had voted for war in 1812, adding, “they must stand condemned as weak, ignorant, and impolitic men.” During the treaty deliberations in the Senate, Federalist senator Rufus King of New York, though he supported ratification, “poured forty minutes of sarcastic oratory on the war and its backers.” Hopeful Federalists assumed that the Republicans, having been forced to accept a treaty that did not secure the nation’s stated objectives in the war, would be punished at the polls. “The treaty must be deemed disgraceful to the Government who made the war and the peace,” said Federalist senator Christopher Gore of Massachusetts, “and will be so adjudged by all, after the first effusions of joy and relief have subsided.”

  It was not to be. The American public was in no mood to be told that the War of 1812 had been futile and unnecessary. They much preferred the story line offered by the Republicans—that Americans had prevailed in a great patriotic campaign. “We have triumphed,” announced the Worcester National Aegis—“let snarling malcontents say what they will, we have gloriously triumphed.” The humiliating reverses in Canada, the near secession of New England, the widespread trading with the enemy, the collapse of the national finances, the near-total destruction of trade, and the hard fact that none of the war’s formal objectives were achieved in the treaty—all of these considerations were quickly wiped from the public memory, and the War of 1812 was proclaimed a “Second War of Independence.” The mood of the country was ebullient: so much so that the period of American history that began in 1815 would be remembered as the “Era of Good Feelings.”

  Henry Clay, who had been both a leading advocate of the war and a principal architect of the peace, asked his House colleagues in January 1816: “Have we gained nothing by the war?”

  Let any man look at the degraded condition of this country before the war; the scorn of the universe, the contempt of ourselves; and tell me if we have gained nothing by the war? What is our present situation? Respectability and character abroad—security and confidence at home. If we have not obtained in the opinion of some the full measure of retribution, our character and our Constitution are placed on a solid basis, never to be shaken.

  Responding to criticism that the Treaty of Ghent was silent on impressment and neutral trading rights, Republicans maintained that these issues had been rendered moot by the pacification of Europe. “Peace, at all time a blessing,” Madison said in his message accompanying ratification, “is peculiarly welcome, therefore, at a period when the causes for the war have ceased to operate.” Retired ex-President Jefferson told a correspondent that the peace was “in fact but an armistice, to be terminated by the first act of impressment committed on an American Citizen.” Clay’s ally in the House, South Carolinian John Calhoun, argued that persisting in the war only to obtain a British concession on impressment “would have been fighting to resist a speculative claim, on the part of the British government, which in practice had ceased.”

  Opponents of the war were vilified for years afterward. “Hartford Convention” became a watchword for treachery and disloyalty, and the anti-war Federalists, as one Republican editor wrote, had only brought “Disappointment!—Disgrace!—Detection!—Despair!” upon themselves. The Federalists had been outmaneuvered yet again, and this time the mistake would prove fatal. The party’s candidates would be routed in the 1816 election, and the long Virginian Republican dynasty would continue with the two-term presidency of James Monroe (1817–25).

  What was remembered and cherished about the War of 1812, above all, was the fact that America’s tiny fleet had shocked and humbled the mightiest navy the world had ever known. Decatur, Hull, Bainbridge, Lawrence, Perry, and Macdonough were among the most exalted heroes of nineteenth-century America: their names were as widely known as the names of Hollywood stars or professional athletes are today. Towns, cities, and counties were named for them. Homes were decorated with engraved prints, pewter cups, platters, punch bowls, urns, and woodcarvings with the images of America’s first ships or their commanders. As early as 1816, enterprising English manufacturers in Staffordshire began decorating ceramic pitchers and plates with scenes of American naval victories, and found plenty of eager buyers in the lucrative U.S. market. Sailors kept fragments of wood said to have come from one of the navy’s victorious ships, as if they were relics of the true cross. Naval mythology aroused a new feeling of national unity after the partisan bitterness of the Federalist and Jeffersonian periods, and it was only after the War of 1812 that Americans began speaking of the United States in the singular rather than in the plural.

  The last vestiges of Republican anti-navalism were abandoned. No sooner was the Treaty of Ghent ratified than Madison asked Congress for a declaration of war against Algiers, which had seized the opportunity afforded by the Anglo-American war to resume attacks on U.S. shipping. Two separate squadrons were prepared to sail for the Mediterranean—one in Boston, under William Bainbridge, and one in New York, under Stephen Decatur. As Bainbridge was the senior officer, he would command the newly launched 74-gun battleship Independence. Decatur’s nine-ship squadron (which included the Constellation) sailed on May 20, 1815. Decatur’s force captured the Algerian frigate Mashuda, and on July 3, with the guns of the squadron trained on his city, the Dey of Algiers signed a treaty forswearing future tribute and releasing American prisoners with no payment of ransom. Decatur then sailed to Tunis and Tripoli, extracting similar concessions, as well as cash payments to compensate American shipowners for their recent losses. The United States would never again encounter problems with the Barbary powers. Bainbridge, detained in Boston by delays in the outfitting of the Independence, arrived in the Mediterranean too late to share any of the glory, and was resentful toward Decatur for years afterward. Decatur, now the most prominent naval hero in American history, returned to the United States and proposed a famously double-edged toast at a banquet in his honor: “To our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right—but our country, right or wrong.”

  Congress had ordered a new ship construction program late in 1812, and several vessels were launched and fitted out in the immediate aftermath of the war. These included, in addition to the Independence, the 74-gun battleships Washington and Franklin, as well as the new 44-gun frigates Guerrière and Java, whose names were intended to annoy the British. A sixth was the 30-gun Fulton, the world’s first steam-powered frigate, propelled by a single paddle wheel that was enclosed within two pontoon hulls in order to protect it from enemy shot. The Fulton was an unwieldy vessel, and the internal-wheel design was soon abandoned. More than half a century would pass before the last sailing warships were rendered obsolete.


  The nation’s new enthusiasm for naval power continued into the postwar years. Madison, allowing that “a certain degree of preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disasters in the onset, but affords also security for the continuance of the peace,” asked Congress to enact a long-term building program. Passage of an Act for the Gradual Increase of the Navy followed in April 1816. This law authorized the construction of nine battleships and twelve heavy frigates at a projected cost of $1 million per year for a period of eight years. Jefferson, commenting privately to Monroe in a letter of January 1815, recognized that a complete repudiation of the principles of 1801 was inevitable, given the performance of the navy in the war: “Frigates and seventy fours are a sacrifice we must make, heavy as it is, to the prejudices of a part of our citizens.”

  The navy of the early nineteenth century was chiefly occupied in suppressing piracy and the slave trade, but confidence in the long-term potential of American naval power was a factor in the so-called Monroe Doctrine, articulated by President Monroe (though largely formulated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams) in his annual message of December 1823. The president declared that North and South America “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers…that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety…we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing [the Latin American republics], or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

  NEARLY TWO CENTURIES after the fact, the causes and effects of the War of 1812 remain a subject of spirited debate among historians. The war lacked the historical significance of the American Revolution, and it never approached the scale of the Civil War or the major wars of the twentieth century. From England’s point of view, it was a sideshow in the long contest with Napoleon. It was a war ostensibly declared in defense of American maritime rights, but it was deeply unpopular among the inhabitants of the northern seaports. It was a conflict between sovereign nations, but it was imbued with the intimate personal bitterness of a civil war. It might have been avoided if not for bad luck and bungling diplomacy on both sides. Had a telegraph cable linked London and Washington in 1812, the war would not have been fought; had such a cable existed in 1815, General Pakenham’s troops would have returned to their families in England and not been slaughtered on a battlefield south of New Orleans two weeks after the treaty had been signed. No other foreign war has ever divided the American people so bitterly, and if it had lasted one year longer it might have caused a dissolution of the Union. At the close of hostilities, neither side could point to any tangible gains, and the Americans were forced to admit they had been fortunate not to have lost territory on the Canadian border.

  Winston Churchill, in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, pronounces the War of 1812 a “futile and unnecessary war”—but adds, almost in the same breath, that “the results of the peace were solid and enduring.” This is an essential point. There were many cases after 1815 in which British and American interests clashed, but diplomacy somehow prevailed in resolving every dispute, and there was never a third Anglo-American war. Not many contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, in 1815, would have believed such a result was possible. British and American newspapers frequently spoke of the likelihood of a renewed war. In 1816, Henry Clay told his colleagues in the House: “That man must be blind to the indications of the future, who cannot see that we are destined to have war after war with Great Britain, until, if one of the two nations be not crushed, all grounds of collision shall have ceased between us.”

  But the lessons of the war were taken to heart. “Anti-American sentiment in Great Britain ran high for several years, but the United States was never again refused proper treatment as an independent Power,” wrote Churchill. “The British Army and Navy had learned to respect their former colonials.” The point was echoed in private correspondence from the postwar period. The U.S. Army had done poorly, on the whole, in several attempts to invade Canada, and the Canadians had shown that they would fight bravely to defend their country. But the British did not doubt that the thinly populated territory would be vulnerable in a third war. Admiral Sir David Milne told a correspondent, in 1817, “we cannot keep Canada if the Americans declare war against us.”

  Although the Treaty of Ghent did not provide any security against the impressment of seamen from American ships, the practice ended. Even during the naval remobilization of the “Hundred Days” in 1815, the Royal Navy took the utmost pains not to permit the impressment of seamen from American ships. In population, in economic production, and in territorial extent, the United States was growing more rapidly than Britain. With these demographic trends in mind, Henry Adams passed his judgment on the Treaty of Ghent: “Perhaps at that moment the Americans were the chief losers; but they gained their greatest triumph in referring all their disputes to be settled by time, the final negotiator, whose decision they could safely trust.”

  A FLOURISHING LITERARY TRADITION grew up around the U.S. Navy in the first half of the nineteenth century, but the early writers and historians, with a few exceptions, did the subject little justice. Modeled after the “heroic style” of the classical historians, particularly Livy and Virgil, these early works were generally full of errors, overwrought, and shot through with national bias. Their authors adopted a swaggering, romantic tone: frigate actions were depicted as a kind of latter-day contact sport, fought with goodhumored bravado by dashing young officers and cheerful roughneck sailors. One such work, published in 1816, was entitled Naval Monument, containing official and other accounts of the battles fought between the navies of the United States and Great Britain during the late war. The cover illustration depicts a regal female figure, “America,” riding across the surface of the sea in a chariot formed of waves. The god Neptune, her charioteer, points his trident to the top of an immense stone pedestal, rising somehow from the sea, upon which stand several of the victorious American officers of the War of 1812.

  Among the authors who wrote on the early navy were several of the giants of nineteenth-century American literature. Washington Irving published a series of biographies of American naval officers in the Analectic Review. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Captain “Mad Jack” Percival, who commanded the Constitution in the 1840s, in his American Note-Books. Herman Melville served as an ordinary seaman aboard the frigate United States in 1843–44 and published a thinly fictionalized account of his experience in the 1850 novel White-Jacket. James Fenimore Cooper served briefly in the navy as a midshipman in 1808, and later published several sea novels, including The Pilot (1824), The Two Admirals (1842), and The Sea Lions (1849). In 1839, Cooper published his History of the Navy of the United States of America, a poorly written panegyric that is nevertheless deemed required reading for modern naval historians, because the author enjoyed direct access to living witnesses and participants in the events described in his book. None of these works is well remembered today, but they tended to sell briskly at the time they were published, providing a lucrative source of income to authors who were often living hand-to-mouth. Though White-Jacket is ranked as one of Melville’s lesser works, for example, it sold far better than did Moby-Dick during the author’s lifetime.

  Not many British writers were inclined to linger over the War of 1812, and Wellington’s great victory over Napoleon at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, made it that much easier to put the entire episode out of mind. In contrast to the postwar publishing boom in the United States, very few works were written or published in England on either the land or naval operations of the War of 1812.* An exception was Naval Occurrences of the War of 1812: A Full and Correct Account of the Naval War Between Great Britain and the United States of America, 1812–1815, first published in 1817 by an English Admiralty lawyer named William James. Naval Occurren
ces was widely read and hugely influential, so much so that it became the standard British text on the naval war of 1812–15, and was largely accepted by later generations of British naval historians as the last word on the subject. James subsequently published a magisterial six-volume Naval History of Great Britain, covering the period from 1793 to 1827. Based on the latter work, especially, James has been nominated by his admirers as “the father of modern naval history.”

  Having practiced for many years in the Admiralty Courts of Jamaica, James had happened to be passing through the United States when the War of 1812 was declared. Arrested in Philadelphia as an enemy alien, James was still in the city in August, when news arrived that the Guerrière had been captured by the Constitution. Shaken by the event, but suspecting that the Guerrière had been overmatched by the American frigate, James began to gather data on the U.S. Navy in preparation to write a book correcting the record. In October 1813, James escaped from Philadelphia and made his way to Halifax the following month. There he wrote several articles for the Naval Chronicle. Returning to England after the Treaty of Ghent, James persuaded several of the officers who had fought in the American war to provide him with information and assistance. He worked at a breakneck pace, completing Naval Occurrences of the War of 1812, a full seven hundred pages long, in the spring of 1817.

  The accounts of individual battles in Naval Occurrences are written with great attention to detail, and in many respects the book set a new standard for research methodology in naval history. James’s legal training is apparent throughout the book. Documentary evidence is often examined with impressive thoroughness, statistics are cited authoritatively and marshaled effectively in support of the book’s thesis, and inconsistencies are exposed in the penetrating style of a lawyer’s cross-examination of a witness. Official letters and excerpts from court proceedings are helpfully published in a long appendix, altogether comprising over one hundred documents. On the whole, James demonstrated, convincingly, that many of the American successes in the naval war were due in large part to the superior size and armament of the American ships. Since none of the “instant histories” appearing in the United States after the war had acknowledged this important point, while many had actually asserted that the reverse was true, James’s book served as a useful corrective.