by John McCain
Vice Admiral George Berkeley, commander of the British North American Station in Halifax, Nova Scotia, wrote the U.S. secretary of the navy, Robert Smith, to demand the runaways’ return. Smith wrote to Commodore Barron, who investigated the matter and reported that three of the four were native-born Americans: Strachan and Ware were from Maryland, and Martin was a native of Massachusetts. Barron wasn’t certain about Ratford, who had enlisted under an alias. Smith dutifully informed Admiral Berkeley the men were American citizens and would not be returned. An infuriated Berkeley issued orders to his fleet, instructing his captains to stop the Chesapeake once she put to sea and recover the deserters by force if necessary, which is what the Leopard intended when she hailed the Chesapeake.
The Chesapeake’s captain wasn’t expecting a battle that day, nor was he prepared for one. Many of his crew were new recruits; his stores had yet to be secured below decks. Two women were aboard, traveling to Europe with a party of civilians, and were standing on deck chatting with some of the officers.
The Leopard’s captain, Salisbury Humphreys, sent a lieutenant to the Chesapeake with a search warrant. Barron explained that he had investigated the matter and determined they were U.S. citizens who had been wrongly impressed into British service. The lieutenant asked for a private word in the captain’s cabin, where he made clear to Barron that they would search the ship and apprehend the deserters with or without his permission. Barron refused again and didn’t appear to take the warning seriously. He sent the officer back to the Leopard bearing a letter assuring Humphreys that no British sailors were aboard the Chesapeake. When Barron’s officers asked him if they should prepare the ship’s guns for action, he dismissed the idea and conversed with the two female passengers before returning to his cabin.
The Leopard, with Humphreys’s emissary back on board, fired a shot across the Chesapeake’s bow, followed quickly by a full broadside. The ladies were rushed below deck. Commodore Barron emerged from his cabin shouting, “To quarters!” Three of her crew lay dead on her decks, and another eighteen had been wounded. The Chesapeake managed to fire only a single gun in retaliation before Barron ordered her colors struck and surrendered. The Leopard refused the surrender. Humphreys boarded her, arrested the four men, and sailed for Halifax.
The Chesapeake returned to Norfolk in disgrace. Barron was court-martialed and suspended from service. Jenkins Ratford was tried for desertion and hanged from a yardarm in Halifax. Americans seethed over the violation of American sovereignty and clamored for war. A diplomatic crisis ensued. The British government disavowed the action and relieved Admiral Berkeley. It was also prepared to release the three Americans and to pay an indemnity to the wounded and the families of the dead. But Britain refused to discontinue the practice of impressment.
To avert war, President Thomas Jefferson resorted to economic sanctions to compel both Britain and France to respect American neutrality. But the Embargo Act of 1807 hurt American commerce more than it did the two belligerents and was repealed a little more than a year later. Two of the three Americans were eventually returned to the United States; the third had died from disease while in custody. By the time they reached their native soil, the War of 1812 had already begun, caused in part by British injustice to the two surviving Americans, Martin and Ware, who were of African descent.
WELL BEFORE THE TURN of the eighteenth century, black sailors on American whaling and merchant ships were a common sight in the world’s ports. A life at sea offered freedom and mobility to people who were marginalized in their societies. African Americans, primarily from northern coastal communities, were drawn to the maritime industry in disproportionate numbers. They earned decent pay and had opportunities for advancement that were unavailable to them elsewhere, as did white sailors from disadvantaged backgrounds. Life at sea promised adventure and the chance to escape poverty, and for black sailors at least a partial escape from the racial prejudice that prevented them from improving their lives on land. But it was dangerous, arduous employment in harsh conditions with long absences from home, which seldom attracted people who had better options. Thus, of necessity, it was obtainable by men of any race.
The cramped, isolated, and practical world of a ship at sea shaped a social order that, while not free of racial prejudice, placed a higher value on attributes other than skin color. Men worked side by side at the same tasks and relied on each other for their success and safety. They were usually paid the same, shared the same food and quarters, endured the same hardships, suffered the same illnesses, braved the same risks, and died at the same rate. When serving on privateers, they received a fair share of captured prizes. Sailors’ manner of dress, their vernacular, and the rhythm and lyrics of the shanties they sang were the products of their various ethnic traditions, not the least of which were African American traditions. A sailor’s skills and industry influenced his shipmates’ opinions more than his race and won him advancement. As the historian Gerald Afton notes, “Black seamen who persevered for multiple voyages and gained the necessary experience and skills were promoted, and white sailors were subject to the orders of black officers and petty officers.” Some African Americans even managed to become ship’s captains, and a few earned enough to purchase their own ship.
“Atlantic maritime culture,” writes the historian Jeffrey Bolster, “included strong egalitarian impulses that frequently confounded the strict racial etiquette of slave societies.” To illustrate his point, Bolster uses the example of three white sailors who were befriended by a Georgia slave, whom they thanked and shook by the hand, “a gesture unthinkable to most white Americans.”
African Americans in bondage also went to sea, the property of ship owners and captains or owners who hired them out and took their wages. Fugitive slaves found opportunities in the maritime industry as well, using their earnings to purchase their freedom or seizing it by jumping ship when anchored in a free port. There was also among sailors white and black a sense of shared bondage: they were subject to the same deprivations and harsh discipline, including flogging, and expected to pay the same strict obedience to orders on voyages that could last for years. White and black also shared the fear of being taken from their ship and forced into service in the British Navy.
Thus race had nothing to do with the fact that sailors had the most cause to resent British policies that threatened equally their livelihood and liberty. So it is hardly a surprise that when those policies precipitated a war, African American sailors rushed to enlist in their country’s service. The rough equality they experienced in the unique subculture of a ship at sea would be fortified by the most important quality in the unique subculture of men at war: solidarity.
Veterans from every war have the same reasons for enduring all they endured. First, they wanted to get the damn thing over with so they could go home. Second, they didn’t want to let their buddies down.
Much has been written about the camaraderie of soldiers and the practical and psychological reasons that nurture it. I (McCain) can testify to its uniqueness. The bonds I had with men I served with in war have never been replicated in friendships I have made in civilian life, even with my closest friends. It’s not just a difference of intensity; it’s an entirely different species of relationship that simply doesn’t exist outside of war. It is a bond with people with whom you might have little and sometimes nothing else in common beyond the experience of war, some of whom you might not have liked in civilian life, whom you might even have actively disliked. And yet it is a bond that thousands upon thousands of soldiers have honored with their lives. It involves total reliance on each other, a trust that breeds virtues up and down the line, not the least of which is the courage it takes to withstand bullets, fear, and even death if it comes. And with that trust comes the insistent, overwhelming desire not to be found wanting by the men to your right and left when your courage is put to the test.
The retired general and war hero Hal Moore commanded a battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment at the B
attle of Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam. In the movie based on his memoir of the battle, We Were Soldiers, Moore (played by Mel Gibson) makes the point eloquently as he addresses his battalion on the day before they deploy to Vietnam:
In the 7th Cavalry, we’ve got a captain from the Ukraine; another from Puerto Rico. We’ve got Japanese, Chinese, Blacks, Hispanics, Cherokee Indians, Jews and Gentiles. All Americans. Now here in the states, some of you in this unit may have experienced discrimination because of race or creed. But for you and me now, all that is gone. We’re moving into the valley of the shadow of death, where you will watch the back of the man next to you, as he will watch yours. And you won’t care what color he is or by what name he calls God. They say we’re leaving home. We’re going to what home is supposed to be.
The navy in which African Americans enlisted in 1812 certainly wasn’t free of racial prejudice. It wasn’t what home was supposed to be if you observed the social mores of the time. And it wasn’t a test-tube culture simulating a genuine brotherhood of man. The cruelties and other corruptions of war are antithetical to the virtues of just societies. Their service in that war, as it would be in other wars, was a practical necessity to the government that welcomed and armed them. And the brotherhood they entered was nothing more, but certainly nothing less, than a society of rough men with rough ways, encountering extreme adversity together, suffering sickness and injury together, killing and dying together, being terrified and brave and relieved and destroyed together, and discovering that all they had in that weird, vicious, and scary world was each other.
At the start of the War of 1812 African Americans were officially barred from service in the army, although the war’s growing manpower needs would eventually cause the army to change its policy. Before the war blacks were also officially excluded from naval service, but that policy had always been more or less ignored. After war was declared, African Americans were welcomed in the navy by an act of Congress. They had suffered no less than white sailors at the hands of the British. They had pride in their seamanship, and a desire to prove their value to their country, which they hoped would improve their race’s position in American society after the war. So they went to war for America, for “free trade and sailors’ rights.”
THE U.S. NAVY IN 1812 was considerably smaller than the enemy’s, but not necessarily outclassed. American warships were well built and well handled. American frigates were heavier and carried more cannon than their British counterparts. Many of their captains were aggressive and resourceful, and their crews skilled and brave under fire. Moreover most of the Royal Navy’s six hundred ships along with most of the British Army were still engaged in the war with Napoleon and wouldn’t be available for the war with America until Napoleon’s abdication and exile in April 1814.
American victories in the early stages of the war were won on the sea, beginning with a brief but decisive battle off the coast of Newfoundland. The three-masted, forty-four-gun heavy frigate USS Constitution, named by George Washington, was launched in 1797 and is still afloat today at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. On August 19, 1812, she was searching the North Atlantic for British frigates to fight, when one of her crew spotted the sails of HMS Guerriere. Two hours later the British frigate was burning to the waterline.
The Guerriere fired the first shot. The Constitution’s experienced captain, Isaac Hull, a Connecticut native and lifelong mariner, deftly maneuvered her alongside the Guerriere within pistol range and fired a double-loaded broadside of grapeshot and shell, battering her severely. The British ship lost her mizzenmast, and her bowsprit became caught in the Constitution’s rigging. The crews of the entangled ships exchanged musket fire, with marksmen firing from the mast tops to deadly effect. Casualties were heavy on both sides, but when the Guerriere finally broke free her other two masts collapsed. She was dead in the water and surrendered. Hull took the British survivors on board, ordered the Guerriere torched, and sailed the Constitution back to her home port, Boston, and to the huzzahs of its citizens. Her sailors recalled British shot bouncing off the Constitution’s thick hull and christened her “Old Ironsides,” the nickname she is still called today.
African Americans constituted at least a tenth and probably more of the Constitution’s crew. However many they were, they left little doubt of their ability and courage. Of them Hull wrote later, “I never had any better fighters. . . . They stripped to the waist and fought like devils, sir, seeming to be utterly insensible to danger and to be possessed with a determination to outfight the white sailors.”
Americans won several other naval engagements that first year. Black sailors fought with distinction in every one of them, as they did in most and likely all the naval battles of the war. Accounts of their individual heroism are scarce, but enough testimonies exist to conclude that race had little bearing on whether a sailor could prove himself in combat. In combat men don’t kill and die for their race; your only enemy is the man trying to kill you and those who stand with you. Men die because they were brave or foolish or slow or unlucky; they live because they were brave or smart or resourceful or lucky. The survivors share the same fatigue and grief, and the dead are buried in the same indifferent sea.
However, prejudices that were ignored or held in check in the nondiscriminating realities of war were usually only held in abeyance aboard ship. When warships sailed into port to replenish their stores and wait for new orders, African Americans were often granted only restricted liberty and were sometimes denied permission to leave the ship at all. When the war was finished, the society they returned to and had risked everything for remained as bigoted as it had been before the war.
Even African Americans who were taken prisoner during the war found prison life as segregated as civilian society. The British built a prison in 1809 on a remote, windswept moor in Devonshire to hold French soldiers during the Napoleonic wars. Sixty-five hundred Americans would be imprisoned at Dartmoor over the course of the War of 1812, most of them taken from captured privateers and a smaller number from navy warships. The proportion of African American prisoners was the same as in the general population of American seamen, between 15 and 20 percent.
Dartmoor was an immense stone fortress with two concentric walls. The outside wall was a mile in circumference, enclosing nearly fifteen acres. Prisoners passed through five separate gates as they were brought to one of seven stone prison blocks, each constructed to hold a thousand inmates. The blocks were unheated and freezing in the winter. There were no beds or other furniture; prisoners slept in hammocks or on the floor, with many forced to accept the latter as the number of prisoners interned in each block eventually grew to as many as fifteen hundred. The nearest city was Plymouth, where the prisoners were landed and then marched seventeen miles at bayonet point over the freezing moor, poorly clothed and often shoeless. Situated in a desolate, unforgiving wilderness and guarded by two thousand British militia, Dartmoor made escape nearly impossible.
Discipline was harsh, living conditions were miserable, the food was rotten, disease was rampant, and prisoners suffered constant exposure to the elements. Something like three hundred of the thousands of Americans crowded there would never leave. They were buried in a shallow, unconsecrated mass grave outside the prison walls, where decades later ceaseless wind and rooting animals would disinter them, leaving their bones bleaching on the moors.
As soon as Americans arrived at Dartmoor they segregated themselves by race. The integration African Americans had become accustomed to at sea was spurned by the white prisoners, who had recently fought beside them, had suffered and celebrated and buried their dead together, and now insisted on reclaiming racial superiority. Most of the African American inmates were crowded into No. 4 Block, which had been designated as quarters for the prison population’s “undesirables.”
Although British muskets kept them captive and imposed discipline, the prisoners themselves ran the place. Most captured officers were either paroled to live in relative comfort in nearby vi
llages, as long as they promised not to escape, or interned in buildings just outside the prison’s walls. White seamen were free to organize their ranks, which they did more or less democratically. They elected committees to adjudicate disputes and punish wrongdoing and to operate businesses and markets, laundries, churches, and various entertainments.
The British allowed black inmates to administrate their prison block as well, which they did by decidedly less democratic methods. No. 4 Block was ruled by a monarch, Richard Crafus, a native of Maryland, known to his subjects and to all Americans at Dartmoor as “King Dick.” Wearing a grenadier’s bearskin cap and standing six feet three inches, he was a fierce brawler and natural autocrat, enforcing his will with the large club he carried at all times, in the company of two handsome white sailors he employed as his retinue. He patrolled his kingdom daily, threatening and beating prisoners who violated the rules or offended his sense of decorum. He intimidated white prisoners as much as he did his own subjects.
Unsurprisingly, then, under King Dick’s regime, No. 4 Block contained a more orderly society than the democratically run white cell blocks. It was cleaner, less troubled by petty crimes, and apparently a more congenial place as well. The entertainment on offer—gambling, theatrical performances, boxing matches—was generally acknowledged to be superior to the amusements staged in the other blocks. Consequently white prisoners frequently went to No. 4 to trade or take in a play or bet on a sporting match. Small numbers even chose to live there. Troublemaking prisoners known as “rough allies” were usually transferred to No. 4, where they temporarily reformed themselves enough not to disturb the peace noticeably and face the King’s justice.
