1812: The Navy's War

by George Daughan

  While Stewart was securing his frigate, Rear Admiral George Cockburn set out from Bermuda in the 74-gun Marlborough with a squadron to take command in the Chesapeake and in the Delaware. Fighting contrary winds in the Gulf Stream, he arrived at Lynnhaven Bay inside the Chesapeake Capes on the third of March. His fleet now consisted of three seventy-fours, Poictiers, Victorious, and Dragon; four frigates, Maidstone, Junon, Belvidera (Captain Richard Byron still in command), and Statira; along with assorted smaller vessels. Cockburn sent Captain Sir John Beresford in the 74-gun Poictiers with a few smaller vessels to secure Delaware Bay.

  Cockburn’s first objective was capturing the Constellation. Her defenses were now formidable. Craney Island, which guarded the mouth of the Elizabeth River, was heavily fortified. Even if Cockburn could drive the defenders off the island, his larger ships could not get up the Elizabeth River, nor could his smaller ones, since a flotilla of gunboats and shore batteries guarded Norfolk and Gosport. He did not have the resources to attack overland, so he reluctantly decided to wait for them. Once he had enough troops, he planned to attack the frigate “at the same time on both banks.”

  Nineteen days later, Admiral Warren himself arrived in the San Domingo with additional ships, increasing the British squadron to five 74-gun sails of the line (Marlborough, San Domingo, Poictiers, Victorious, and Dragon), five frigates, two sloops of war, three tenders, and assorted smaller vessels—by any measure, an immense fleet.

  Captain Stewart expected an attack momentarily, but knowing the Constellation was trapped, Warren decided to wait for more ground troops before making a move on her. He turned instead to hit-and-run raids along the shores of the Chesapeake, up her great rivers—the James, York, Rappahannock, Potomac, Patuxent, Patapsco, and Susquehanna—and her innumerable creeks and inlets. He hoped to rattle Washington and bring home the war to the residents of the entire area, undermining support for the war. He also wanted to create a big enough diversion that Madison would be forced to pull resources from the Canadian theater to defend Chesapeake Bay. Governor-General Prevost had been urging Warren to help take the pressure off Canada.

  Leaving a force to guard the Elizabeth River, Warren sailed the rest of his squadron up to Annapolis as a sort of demonstration, taking whatever prizes came his way and sending raiding parties up nearby rivers and creeks. He then dispatched Cockburn with an amphibious force of one frigate, two brigs, four schooners, and three hundred men to the head of the bay to conduct more raids. The aggressive Cockburn delighted in the assignment, but, as always, he and Warren had to be concerned with desertion. When their small boats rowed up the narrow creeks and rivers, men took whatever opportunity presented itself and ran away. The loss of men had to be balanced against sinking, capturing, or burning a few small vessels, plantations, villages, and towns. Seamen were not easily replaced.

  On April 12 Cockburn landed on Sharpe’s Island at the mouth of the Choptank River and made off with some cattle for the fleet, which he paid for because the residents offered no resistance. On April 18 he appeared off the mouth of the Patapsco River, alarming Baltimore, taking soundings, and assessing the city’s defenses, particularly Fort McHenry.

  Making charts wherever he went, Cockburn continued his rampage, dropping anchor on April 23 off Spesuite Island at the mouth of the Susquehanna River, where he obtained enough fresh food for Warren’s entire fleet with no difficulty. Four days later his marines occupied Poplar Island, and the next day Tilghman Island. Cockburn then attacked tiny Frenchtown on the Elk River, burning the village’s twelve buildings and destroying a few small vessels. On May 2 he attacked Harve de Grace, looting and burning forty of its sixty homes, Commodore John Rodgers’s estate, Sion Hill, among them. As the British looted Rodgers’s mansion, his mother, wife, and two sisters fled. They were allowed to depart before the invaders torched the building.

  Cockburn then rowed four miles up the Susquehanna and destroyed—again without opposition—the Principio Iron Works, one of the country’s largest cannon foundries, and took away all the cannon and small arms warehoused there. On May 6 he entered the Sassafras River and sailed to the Maryland towns of Fredericktown and Georgetown, where he finally met some resistance from Maryland militiamen. In the ensuing fight, five of his men were wounded before they swept away the militiamen and burned both towns.

  In a month and a half, Warren and Cockburn, raiding at will, took forty prizes and created alarm throughout the bay area. Washington was certainly shaken. “I . . . keep the old Tunisian sabre within reach,” Dolley Madison wrote to Edward Coles, the president’s private secretary, on May 12. “One of our generals has discovered a plan of the British,—it is to land as many chosen rogues as they can about fourteen miles below Alexandria, in the night, so that they may be on hand to burn the President’s house and offices. I do not tremble at this, but feel hurt that the admiral (of Havre de Grace memory) should send me word that he would make his bow at my drawing room very soon.”

  Cockburn was indeed interested in Washington. He had had such an easy time of it marauding in Chesapeake Bay that he yearned to do more, such as capturing the capital, along with Baltimore and Annapolis. He was convinced they would fall easily. But London was still occupied with Napoleon, and the British ministry was not ready for anything other than hit-and-run raids in the Chesapeake and a tight blockade.

  This gave the federal and state governments time to prepare defenses. Only Baltimore woke up to its vulnerability, however. The city had a population of close to 50,000, and under the leadership of Senator Samuel Smith a stout defense was organized. Fort McHenry, which had become a pathetic wreck with only fifty regulars and a few pitiful guns, was transformed into a strongpoint. Situated on Whetstone Point, the fort guarded the approaches to the city by water. If large British warships were able to get past it, they could unleash a devastating bombardment on the city. Overcoming serious obstacles of every kind, Smith managed by the fall of 1813 to have sixty heavy naval guns mounted and ready at the fort. Fifty-six of the guns came from a French warship that sank in the Chesapeake. When the ship was salvaged, the French consul in Baltimore donated the guns. Ship hulks were readied to be sunk as well. They would help block any British attempt to rush by the fort into the inner harbor.

  General Smith’s experience with Baltimore’s defenses went back to 1778, during the Revolution, when he prepared the city for a possible invasion. During the first months of the War of 1812, however, Smith could not rouse any interest in improving the city’s defenses. The governor of Maryland, Levin Winder, ignored the danger. It took the outrage generated by Admiral Cockburn’s raids to give Smith the political support he needed to dramatically improve Baltimore’s security.

  Smith thought North Point on Patapsco Neck was the logical place for the British to land an expeditionary force. Deep water there allowed large warships to come in close to shore and protect troop transports as they unloaded. Smith expected that a land attack would be combined with a sea bombardment of Fort McHenry. To give additional protection to the fort, he constructed two batteries on the Ferry Branch—Forts Covington and Babcock.

  Unlike Smith, President Madison failed to improve Washington’s defenses, even though he thought the city was bound to be an inviting target. It was the nation’s capital, after all, and had a tiny population of only 8,200 (1,400 of whom were slaves). The difficulty vessels of any size would have in navigating the Potomac’s shoals and sandbars was a natural defense, and Fort Washington, twelve miles below the city, could be an important obstacle as well, but the fort and its personnel were unaccountably not strengthened. All Secretary Jones did was organize an embarrassingly small Potomac flotilla, consisting of one schooner and three gunboats, under Master Commandant Arthur Sinclair, designed to counter small enemy vessels in the river.

  A seaborne attack on Washington using the Potomac River was far less likely than an attack by land through the small town of Bladensburg, eight miles to the northeast. But Madison made no effort to erect defen
ses there either. Monroe wanted to prepare a vigorous defense of the capital, as Smith was doing in Baltimore, but Secretary Armstrong did not think Washington was in any immediate danger, and the president apparently accepted his appraisal.

  ON MAY 17, 1813, Admiral Warren sailed to Bermuda with forty prizes, planning to return to the Chesapeake shortly. He was back in mid-June with 2,000 additional troops under General Sir Sydney Beckwith, a distinguished British officer. Warren now had the wherewithal to go after the Constellation in the Elizabeth River.

  Before Warren could mount an assault, Captain Cassin ordered Master Commandant Joseph Tarbell to conduct a gunboat attack on three British frigates anchored off Newport News. On June 20 at four o’clock in the morning, Tarbell’s fifteen boats went after the 38-gun Junon, under Captain James Sanders. The water was dead flat calm, and the Junon was sitting apart from her two companions. Tarbell opened fire at three-quarters of a mile, but as luck would have it, half an hour later, a fortuitous breeze sprang up, allowing the other two frigates, the Narcissus and the Barossa, to get under way and come to Junon’s rescue. Tarbell retreated, barely managing to escape. He wrote later that if the breeze had held off a while, he would have captured or destroyed the Junon.

  Warren now proceeded against the Constellation. He first had to neutralize Craney Island. Captains Stewart and Cassin and Brigadier General Robert Taylor of the Virginia militia had made the island a tough obstacle, however, erecting a strong battery of seven guns, supported by seven hundred troops, sailors from the Constellation, and fifteen gunboats strung across the mouth of the river.

  While Stewart had been in the midst of preparing to resist an attack, Secretary Jones, on May 7, ordered him unexpectedly to take command of the Constitution in Boston. It was a bizarre move. Stewart was one of the navy’s stellar fighters, and he was getting ready for a showdown with the British commander in North America. To pull him away at this critical moment to command a frigate that would not be ready to sail for months was hard to believe. Instead of being at the center of the action, Stewart would be sitting idly in Boston. It was one of Jones’s poorest decisions. Tarbell temporarily replaced Stewart.

  Warren’s attack came on June 22. Although outnumbering the defenders, and having vastly more firepower, the British were unable to even land on Craney Island, much less capture it. Beckwith’s attack from the land failed to reach the island, as did Warren’s men, when they attempted to land by boat. When Warren saw how difficult Craney was going to be—even before he got upriver to attack the defenses there—he called off the whole operation and reembarked the troops. He decided to leave the Constellation trapped for the rest of the war. The Admiralty was unimpressed with Warren’s excuses. So far as London was concerned, his failure to capture the Constellation was more evidence of his ineffectiveness.

  On June 25, to compensate for the Craney Island fiasco, Beckwith attacked the lightly defended village of Hampton, ten miles away on the north side of the James River. He captured it easily and let his men loose to rape and pillage, which they did with abandon. Their behavior was so gross that Warren and Beckwith were embarrassed, although no soldiers were punished for what they did. Beckwith blamed the atrocious behavior on French soldiers (convicts who preferred fighting for Britain to rotting in prison), but the damage was done. Accounts of the atrocity helped boost American support for the war.

  Warren now turned his attention to destroying the 28-gun Adams in the Washington Navy Yard, hoping to gain some favor with the Admiralty, which still had destruction of the American fleet as its first priority. He arrived with his squadron at the mouth of the Potomac on the first of July, but the river’s considerable impediments baffled him, and he withdrew. He then sailed toward Annapolis and Baltimore but attacked neither of them.

  While Warren was sailing about rather aimlessly, Cockburn was active, leading a squadron of seven ships to Ocracoke Inlet, which connected Pamlico Sound with the Atlantic Ocean. He arrived on July 12. Goods from the Chesapeake area were getting to sea via the unguarded inlet. Warren ordered Cockburn to destroy all the vessels there, which he proceeded to do. Afterward, he replenished his ships, loaded all the food he could for Warren’s fleet, and sailed back to Lynnhaven Bay.

  On July 16, while Cockburn was at Ocracoke Inlet, an American inventor named Elijah Mix set out to sink the 74-gun Plantagenet, one of the battleships moored in Lynnhaven Bay, with a torpedo. Mix worked closely with Captain Charles Gordon, who had recently taken command of the Constellation, to fashion a weapon similar to one being experimented on by Robert Fulton. The “torpedo” was really a mine. Fulton had obtained his design from David Bushnell, who had developed an underwater explosive during the American Revolution. Fulton copied Bushnell’s ideas without attribution until the publication of Bushnell’s discoveries in Paris forced Fulton to admit his debt to the Revolutionary War hero.

  Fulton’s torpedo had been around since 1800, and he was still looking for a buyer. It had been taken seriously at one time by Napoleon and later by Prime Minister Pitt of Great Britain. But Fulton could never demonstrate that it was practical. Nonetheless, the idea continued to intrigue, and on March 3, 1813, the U.S. Congress passed a law to pay any person who sank a British ship, no matter how it was done, one half of the ship’s value. That set scores of inventors to work, including Mix, who intended to transport his floating mine in a large open boat, row close to the target, drop the torpedo in the water, and let it drift into the warship’s side, exploding on impact and making a hole large enough to sink it.

  On the sixteenth of July, Mix’s boat, Chesapeake’s Revenge, approached to within two hundred forty feet of the Plantagenet before one of her guard boats ran him off. The setback did not deter Mix; he was determined to sink her. From the nineteenth to the twenty-third he made repeated attempts but failed each time. On the twenty-fourth, however, he crept to within a hundred yards of the target, dropped the torpedo in the water, and watched it drift toward the Plantagenet , closer and closer. Suddenly, just before reaching the ship, it exploded, sending a spectacular pyramid of water, fifty feet in circumference and fifty feet high, shooting into the air, close enough to spew water on the ship’s deck and damage her side. The fireworks were inspiring, but the ship still rode at her anchor. Mix tried to improve his technique, but he could not get any more gunpowder from the navy and made no further attacks.

  Meanwhile, Cockburn returned to the Chesapeake, and in August he resumed raiding, occupying Kent’s Island in the upper bay and using it as a base. On August 10 he attacked the town of St. Michaels, but the Maryland militia, aroused by Cockburn’s brutal tactics, put up a stout defense and drove him off. The massing of the militia led Cockburn to close down his operations and return to Lynnhaven Bay.

  Warren now decided to withdraw most of his fleet from the Chesapeake during the first week of September. The success of the Maryland militia, losses from desertions and disease, as well as the need to refit and resupply his ships in a healthier climate caused him to leave temporarily. He sailed with some of his fleet to Halifax, and the rest he sent to Bermuda with Cockburn. Captain Robert Barrie stayed behind to continue the blockade with one sail of the line, two frigates, two brigs, and three schooners.

  FURIOUS WITH THE lack of offense or defense against Cockburn on the water, fifty-four-year old Joshua Barney wrote to Secretary Jones on July 4, 1813, urging him to build a fleet of at least twenty row-galleys to combat the British ships when they returned in the spring of 1814, which Barney was confident they would do. Jones was as frustrated as Barney, and he immediately accepted the offer, appointing Barney to build and command a Chesapeake Bay flotilla. Barney would operate directly under Jones as a separate unit apart from the regular navy. The secretary did not want Barney and his officers complicating the navy’s always delicate seniority system. Barney accepted the appointment and the rank of master commandant. He spent the next few months struggling to get his unique gunboats built and manned before spring.

  CHAPTER S
EVENTEEN

  Oliver Hazard Perry

  WHILE COCKBURN WAS marauding in Chesapeake Bay and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the British and American navies were engaged in a fateful arms race on Lake Erie that would determine which country controlled the northwestern part of the United States and perhaps Upper Canada. The key figure on the American side was twenty-eight-year-old master commandant, Oliver Hazard Perry, from Newport, Rhode Island.

  Back on January 20, 1813, Commodore Chauncey had written to Secretary Jones requesting that Perry be given command of the naval force building on Lake Erie. At the time, Perry was in charge of a small flotilla of gunboats at Newport, unhappy that he was not seeing any action. He came from a prominent navy family; his father, Christopher, had fought with distinction during the Revolution and had been captured twice. The first time, he was confined to the infamous prison ship Jersey in New York Harbor and the second time in a prison camp in Newry, Ireland. Captain Christopher Perry was also a hero of the Quasi-War with France and was taken back into the navy for a time in 1812 to serve as commandant of the Boston Navy Yard. He was at that post when Isaac Hull sailed the Constitution into Boston after his victory over the Guerriere.

  Young Oliver had much to live up to, and he was ready for the challenge—in fact, desperate for it. Despite his age, he was an experienced, well-regarded officer. He had served with his father in the Quasi-War and later in the war against Tripoli, spending fifteen years in the service, rising to the rank of master commandant.