Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  When Ray’s memoir was published in 1808, Bainbridge retorted that its author was “an ungrateful wretch who has no character to lose.” But there was little doubt that the feelings of contempt between Captain Bainbridge and the crews who served under him were widely shared and mutual. Bainbridge had a well-earned reputation as a hard horse, a flogging captain; Preble might have been a stern disciplinarian but Bainbridge was a brute, regularly meting out punishments of thirty-six lashes, putting a man in irons for six weeks for drunkenness, habitually addressing his crews as “you damned rascals.” As a merchant captain he had personally quelled two attempted mutinies with his own fists; as captain of the George Washington he had fractured a man’s skull hitting him over the head with the flat of a sword. While captive in Tripoli, Bainbridge expressed quite plainly what he thought of his crewmen in a letter to Preble: “I believe there never was so depraved a set of mortals as Sailors are; under discipline they are peaceable & serviceable;—divest them of that, and they constitute a perfect rable.” The feeling was returned in full. Thirteen men of the Philadelphia deserted at the very start of the cruise to avoid serving under Bainbridge. Ray in his memoir claimed that the Philadelphia’s crew was near mutiny at the time the ship struck the shoal in Tripoli harbor.40

  Part of what so rankled the men of the American navy was how such treatment, and such attitudes, smacked of the despotism their nation had just finished fighting a revolution to be rid of. American seamen who left a record of their views frequently commented on their rights as free Americans and their resentments at the “petty tyranny” exercised by their officers.

  A man on the Constitution who was about be flogged burst forth in what a shipmate described as a “patriotic speech”: “I thought it was a free country; but I was mistaken. My father was American born, and my mother too. I expected to be treated as an American myself; but I find I’m not.” (“Down with him and put him in irons,” responded an unimpressed lieutenant.) “Such outrages on human nature ought not to be permitted by a government that boasts of liberty,” agreed James Durand, who as a seaman aboard the frigate John Adams in 1804 saw men given eighteen lashes for such “crimes” as spitting on the deck. But, as Durand observed, “no monarch in the world is more absolute than the Captain of a Man-of-war.” John Rea, who served as an ordinary seaman on the George Washington under Bainbridge, bitterly ridiculed all the ceremony that emphasized the captain’s kingly authority: the ritual reading of the articles of war every Sunday to the assembled men, the mustering of the crew to witness punishment, the strictures against speaking back to an officer or expressing so much as an opinion; “all that ridiculous and absurd parade, common on board of English Men-of-War.”

  Especially galling was the lordly attitude of the midshipmen. Following the Royal Navy model, these officers-in-training were referred to as “young gentlemen” (all officers were by definition “gentlemen”), but Rea dismissed them as “brats of boys, twelve or fifteen years old, who six months before had not even seen salt water, strutting in livery about a Ship’s decks, damning and flashing old experienced sailors.”41

  The floggings and discipline, the hieratical rituals, the rigid distinctions between officers (who were “gentlemen”) and men (who were not) had indeed all been copied almost slavishly from the British example. When Preble, in command of the frigate Essex, had put in at Cape Town in March 1800 and had dined night after night with the officers of the British squadron there, he used the opportunity to acquire copies of British naval manuals and squadron orders, diligently studying and marking them up. The American navy’s regulations, first issued in 1798 and revised in 1802, drew directly, often word for word, from the British Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea. It was a natural recourse: the British navy was the most admired and powerful in the world; the two nations shared a common language and heritage. But the British example was already proving an uneasy fit with this new man, the American.42

  THE TRIPOLITAN war dragged on for another year and a half. The Constitution came in several times to bombard the town; a harebrained scheme was hatched by William Eaton, the former American consul in Tunis (a sergeant in George Washington’s army, he was now calling himself “General” Eaton) to gather a band of Arab mercenaries in Cairo, march hundreds of miles across the desert, and replace the pasha of Tripoli with his presumably more compliant brother. But the bombardments were indecisive, and Eaton’s expedition was beset by repeated mutinies and delays. Eight United States marines who took part in the march did play a conspicuous part in bravely taking the fort at Darnah, five hundred miles east of Tripoli, which was as far as the expedition ever got; if it was not exactly “the shores of Tripoli” subsequently referred to in the famous first line of the “Marines’ Hymn,” their action may have helped put pressure on the pasha to come to terms.

  In September 1804 the Intrepid had been sent into Tripoli harbor packed with five tons of powder and 150 shells. It was to blow up the Tripolitan gunboats and galleys while they lay at their anchorage at night, the crew escaping in two boats after the fuse was lit, but something went wrong and the ketch exploded prematurely, killing all thirteen men aboard. Preble thought the ship might have been boarded, and Lieutenant Richard Somers had bravely decided to blow up his command rather than surrender. His praise for Somers brought a hurt complaint from Bainbridge, who was convinced it was a slap at him for failing to do the same with the Philadelphia. Preble ended up apologizing to Bainbridge. Dr. Cowdery drew the job of supervising the burial of some of the corpses that had washed up on the shore afterward. They had been mangled by stray dogs when the pasha for days refused to allow them to be collected, after which the remains were placed on public display and the local populace was invited to hurl insults at them before they were finally buried.43

  In the end a treaty was signed in June 1805, the ceremony taking place in the great cabin of the Constitution; the United States would pay no tribute but agreed to a $60,000 ransom for the captives in Tripoli. A twenty-one-gun salute echoed from the castle and was returned by the Constitution. The prisoners got so drunk (despite the strictures of Islam, some of the town’s Jewish and Christian shopkeepers sold alcohol) that Bainbridge delayed bringing them aboard the Constitution for a day until they were clean and presentable. Six men had died during their captivity; five others had “turned Turk,” converting to Islam, and either chose—or were not given any other choice by the pasha—to remain behind.

  Dr. Cowdery was so worried that he would not be permitted to leave either—the pasha had at one point assured him he would not take $20,000 for his release, so valuable a physician had he proved to be—that the doctor deliberately botched an operation on a Tripolitan soldier whose hand had been shattered by a bursting blunderbuss: “I amputated all his fingers but one, with a dull knife, and dressed them in a bungling manner, in the hopes of losing my credibility as a surgeon in this part of the country.”44

  On his return to America, Bainbridge was feted at huge banquets at Richmond, Fredericksburg, Alexandria, and Washington. He basked in it all. Preble, who had been replaced in his command in September 1804, had been welcomed as a conquering hero too; President Jefferson invited him to dine at the White House and Rembrandt Peale painted his portrait. But he was not so sure about it all. “The people are disposed to think that I have rendered some service to my country,” he cautiously told his wife. Three years later he was dead, at age forty-six. Though studiously avoiding public controversy, he had privately told friends the treaty with Tripoli was “ignominious” and a “sacrifice of national honor.” Bainbridge may or may not have remembered the words he himself had written the navy department on first arriving in the Mediterranean, back in September of 1800. “Had we 10 or 12 frigates and sloops in these seas,” Bainbridge insisted, “we should not experience these mortifying degradations.”45

  CHAPTER 2

  Honor’s Shoals

  From the Boston Patriot, February 29, 1812.

&nbs
p; NO VISIT to America was complete for the British traveler of the early 1800s without a letter home laden with disdain for the vulgarity of the inhabitants. Americans were crude, loud, boastful, grasping—and they were ingrates to boot. Augustus J. Foster, secretary to the British legation in 1804, asserted that “from the Province of Maine to the borders of Florida, you would not find 30 men of Truth, Honour, or Integrity. Corruption, Immorality, Irreligion, and above all, self-interest, have corroded the very pillars on which their Liberty rests.” No more than five members of Congress could be considered gentlemen; the rest habitually appeared in “the filthiest dresses.” American women were “a spying, inquisitive, vulgar, and most ignorant race.” President Jefferson himself “is dressed and looks extremely like a plain farmer, and wears his slippers down at the heels.”1

  Those slippers had nearly caused a diplomatic incident themselves. When Foster’s principal, the new British minister Anthony Merry, came to present his credentials to the president, he arrived in full court dress, sash, ceremonial sword, and all. President Jefferson appeared in an old brown coat, faded corduroys, much-soiled linen, and those worn-down slippers. Merry was sure it was a calculated insult to him personally, and to his country officially. The British minister spent the next several months accumulating imagined insults from other displays of American informality, above all the careless egalitarianism of Jefferson’s hospitality at the White House. Jefferson made a point of dispensing with all the elaborate European rules of precedence of place in seating guests at his dinner table; his rule was what he termed “pêle-mêle”: guests found their own seats. This was all news to Merry, who was mortified when Mrs. Merry was not seated next to the president and he found himself elbowed aside by a member of the House of Representatives as he was about to sit down next to the wife of the Spanish minister. Even an official note from Secretary of State James Madison explaining the customs of his host country failed to convince Merry that it was anything but a premeditated plan to give offense.2

  The deeper problem was that most Britons did not really think of the America of 1800 as a real country. The Revolution had given America independence in name, but her claims to a place among the civilized nations of the world struck even sympathetic British observers as pretentious or simply laughable. America’s similarities to Britain only showed her enduring dependence on the mother country; her differences only reflected degeneracy or immaturity, proving how helpless the former colony was on her own. British critics found literally nothing praiseworthy about life in America. In science, art, and literature America was a nullity; “the destruction of her whole literature would not occasion so much regret as we feel for the loss of a few leaves from an antient classic,” pronounced the Edinburgh Review. American conversation consisted of nosy cross-examination of strangers. America’s colleges were little better than grammar schools. The food was ill-cooked, the drinking excessive, the inns crowded, the street brawls savage.3

  Above all, America’s government was a rickety experiment, indecisive and incapable of ever rising to the level of the world’s great powers. The Irish poet Thomas Moore, who visited America in 1804, saw in the vulgarity and roughness of American society a reflection of a government system fatally weakened by airy ideals of republicanism and lacking the steadying influence of a gentry and hereditary aristocracy. “The mail takes twelve passengers, which generally consist of squalling children, stinking negroes, and republicans smoking cigars,” Moore complained. “How often it has occurred to me that nothing can be more emblematic of the government of this country than its stages, filled with a motley mixture, all ‘hail fellows well met,’ driving through mud and filth, which bespatters them as they raise it, and risking an upset at every step.”4

  America’s grasping commercialism and braying talk of liberty, most Britons felt, were all of a piece with its upstart vulgarity. An honest recognition of America’s ongoing dependency on Britain for its very survival, economically and politically, ought to make Americans more grateful and less strident: more willing to accept the place Britain wished to assign her as a very junior partner; happy to behave, in other words, more as the colony they really, in fact, still were, not the excessively proud nation their upset victory at Yorktown had led them to declare themselves to be. “The Alps and Apennines of America are the British Navy,” asserted the Times of London. “If ever that should be removed, a short time will suffice to establish the head-quarters of a Duke-Marshal at Washington, and to divide the territory of the Union into military prefectures.” The even more jingoistic British newspaper the Courier chimed in with the observation that while America was arguably advantageous to Great Britain, Great Britain was necessary to America: “It is British capital, which directly or indirectly, sets half the industry of America in motion: it is the British fleets that give it protection and security.”5

  LIKE ALL caricatures, the picture of America painted by British travelers and opinion writers captured some truths. On a visit to Monticello during the summer of 1805, Augustus Foster observed with more perception and nuance, and less of the automatic disdain that had animated his earlier impressions of America, the contradictions of American democracy, and of the leader who was supposed to embody its values. The president who made a show of democratic simplicity, riding his horse unaccompanied about Washington in his worn coat, spent freely on his own comforts at home atop his mountain retreat in Virginia. There were all the gadgets Jefferson’s guests were expected to admire: the cart equipped with an odometer, the spiral rotating clothes rack. And then Foster, the English aristocrat, found that his own views on human equality and liberty were far more broad-minded than Jefferson’s, at least when it came to extending the American notion of liberty to the black race. Foster thought it self-evident that blacks were “as capable to the full of profiting by the advantages of Education as any other of any Shade whatever,” but the Republican president told him that “the Mental Qualities of the Negro Race” fitted them only “to carry Burthens” and that freedom would only render them more miserable; the American champion of democratic equality dismissed emancipation of the slaves as “an English Hobby,” much as the tea tax had been. And Jefferson the extoller of agrarian virtue was “considered a very bad Farmer,” Foster found in conversation with others nearby; a whole hillside of Monticello had been so negligently cultivated as to have eroded away into gullies so deep that “Houses afterwards might be buried” in them. “They have been obliged to scatter Scotch Broom Seed over it, which at least succeeded in at least hiding the Cavities.” Like the country itself, America’s third president was much given to “speculative doctrines on imaginary perfection” that did not always comport with reality.6

  The reality was that America in the first decade of the new century was poor, weak, and backward. By many measures there had been little progress from colonial days. Compared with London, with its one million people, America’s great cities were little more than overgrown medieval villages. Boston had actually lost population for several years following the Revolution; by 1800 its population stood at 25,000, little more than what it had been thirty years earlier. New York had 60,000, Baltimore 13,000, Charleston 18,000. With the possible sole exception of Philadelphia—whose 70,000 residents enjoyed neatly laid-out blocks, streetlights, drains, and wooden pipes that brought in fresh water—they also had no sanitation to speak of, bad paving, an abundance of dramshops, and periodic outbreaks of yellow fever and other deadly epidemics that sent the residents fleeing for the hills. The still-unpaid cost of the war against Britain, a debt of $82 million, pressed like a dead weight on the national economy; the entire capitalization of all the banks in the country amounted to but a third as much.

  Travel was arduous, erratic, and unbelievably expensive; even in settled New England, stagecoaches crept along barely travelable roads at an average pace of four miles an hour, taking three days from Boston to New York, two days from New York to Philadelphia. From Baltimore to Washington—where the new federal city, all
hope and little reality, was rising on a malarial backwater with nothing to show yet but a single row of brick houses, a few log cabins, the half-finished White House, and, a mile and a half away across a bramble-tangled swamp, the two wings of the Capitol still unconnected by a center—there was a stagecoach but no road at all; the driver chose among meandering tracks in the woods and hoped for the best. To go from Baltimore to New York cost $21, a month’s average wages.7

  South of Washington there were no public conveyances to be had at all, no roads that wagons could traverse, no bank between Alexandria, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, and no call for one. Three-quarters of the nation’s workforce of 1.9 million worked on farms, almost all practicing methods unchanged for a thousand years before, steadily exhausting the soil, making whatever clothes they wore themselves, threshing grain with two sticks bound by a leather hinge or trod-ding it with horses or oxen. Two thousand men in the entire nation, about evenly divided between textiles and primary iron and steel production, earned their wages in basic manufacturing. Houses, even of the wealthiest planters, were run-down; a French visitor to Virginia at this time found genteel poverty the norm: “one finds a well-served table, covered with silver, where for ten years half the window panes have been missing, and where they will be missed for ten years more.”8