Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  War in Disguise was hugely influential in Britain, throwing America’s supporters on the defensive by skillfully casting America not as an innocent wronged but as an actual aggressor, and a deceitful and treacherous one at that. Affirming the correctness of the Essex decision—“that a neutral has no right to deliver a belligerent from the pressure of his enemy’s hostilities, by trading with his colonies in time of war in a way that was prohibited in time of peace”—Stephen went on to accuse America of engaging in conduct that was tantamount to war. Far from America having had her neutral rights violated, America had trespassed Britain’s belligerent rights. Cutting off France from the wealth of her colonies was Britain’s most effective weapon against Napoleon, and the “abuse of the neutral flag” by America to restore that commerce was little more than a French ruse de guerre: American ships had been “made French by adoption.” Moreover, Americans knew it and were lying through their teeth when they tried to say otherwise. American merchants had perpetrated “fraud and perjury,” had violated “the obligations of truth and justice in order to profit unduly by the war,” had corrupted the very morals of American society in the process. American protests were not only baseless, but immoral.

  Stephen concluded by suggesting that Americans were much too wise to fail to see where their true interests lay; Britain was the true defender of liberty. Nor did Britain seek war with a neutral nation. But such a war, he threatened, was infinitely better than “the sacrifice of our maritime rights.”20

  From New York, where the seizure of American merchantmen continued apace, the city’s merchants presented a memorial protesting the “the humiliating and oppressive conduct of ships of war in the vicinity of our coasts and harbors.” From the Caribbean to the Atlantic seaboard to the approaches of the ports of Europe, an American ship was being seized every day or two; at any given time there was $10 million worth of American property awaiting adjudication and possible condemnation in British prize courts. Insurance premiums on cargoes carried by American ships quadrupled.

  A few months later the humiliations boiled over into a riot, and a rage burning and lasting enough that it might have kindled instant war had the country’s leaders fanned it. On the evening of April 25, 1806, the Leander, Cambrian, and Driver were carrying on their usual routine of lobbing cannonballs across the bows of merchantmen passing into New York when a shot from the Leander struck a small coasting sloop inside the harbor. The British captain claimed the sloop had by unlucky chance been in line with the shot, far behind the vessel he was halting. Whatever the facts, the ball struck the helmsman of the sloop, John Pierce, immediately killing him in a particularly gruesome manner: he was completely decapitated.

  The sloop’s captain was Pierce’s brother, and he made his way back to the city, quickly gathered a furious mob, and paraded the mangled body and severed head of the dead man through the streets. The next day a party from the Leander returning to their ship with a load of provisions was intercepted by a mob; the supplies were grabbed and placed on twenty carts that were triumphantly wheeled around the city, drums beating, British colors flying under the American flag from a pole on the lead cart. On reaching the Alms House, the crowd presented their prize for the use of the poor and burned the British flag.

  Four of Leander’s officers caught ashore were thrown in jail for their own protection; protest meetings were called; Pierce was given a huge public funeral; and with a local election scheduled to begin the next day, both political parties made hay of the issue, especially the Federalists, who indignantly blamed the Republicans for refusing to support the construction of a navy that could prevent such affronts. For days Thomas Barclay, the British consul general in New York, hid in his house, fearing he would be killed if he showed his face in public. He wrote reams of letters expressing his regret for the mistake and desperately trying to get the Leander’s officers freed; eventually the city authorities secretly released them and hustled them back aboard their ship.21

  Talk of war began to sound more than just theatrical. “How long must we bear these violations of our National honor, property, and loss of our fellow Citizens,” William Bainbridge wrote Edward Preble when he heard the news. “—O Lord! Grant us a more honorable Peace or a sanguinary war!”22

  Publicly, Jefferson ordered American ports forever closed to the three British ships and the Leander’s captain arrested if he ever were found within American jurisdiction. Privately, the president admitted his first doubts about his party’s rigid opposition to a standing navy as a threat to liberty and a burdensome expenditure that would lead to oppressive taxation and growing government power. To Jacob Crowninshield, a wealthy Salem merchant and Jeffersonian member of Congress, he wrote a few weeks after the event, “Although the scenes which were acted on shore were overdone with electioneering views, yet the act of the British officer was an atrocious violation of our territorial rights.” He lamented that America did not have three frigates to send at once to New York or, even better, some ships of the line building. “That we should have a squadron properly composed to prevent the blockading of our ports,” Jefferson added, “is indispensable.”23

  A couple of months earlier he had conceded a more fundamental doubt about the country’s overall direction. “The love of peace which we sincerely feel & profess,” he wrote one of his correspondents in February, “has begun to produce an opinion in Europe that our government is entirely in Quaker principles.”24

  WHEN THE news of the Essex decision reached Washington, Secretary of State Madison sat down, took up his pen, and produced his own painstaking, lawyerly rebuttal. Exhaustively analyzing the legal precedents, history, justice, and logic of the rules governing neutral trade, Madison concluded that the Rule of 1756 had no basis in the law of nations. The secretary of state had his argument printed as a 204-page booklet and presented every member of Congress with a personal copy. An Examination of the British Doctrine, Which Subjects to Capture a Neutral Trade, Not Open in Time of Peace was thorough, closely argued, solidly reasoned, and absolutely, mind-numbingly dull. Massachusetts senator John Quincy Adams, son of the former president and an eminent scholar, pronounced himself “much pleased” with Madison’s effort—and admitted privately that it took him eight days to get through it. Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire more forthrightly confessed, “I never read a book that fatigued me more than this pamphlet.”

  But it was John Randolph, the flamboyant maverick congressman from Virginia, “old Republican,” constant thorn in the side of the Jefferson administration, owner of a plantation fittingly named Bizarre, who put his finger on the heart of the matter. Flinging Madison’s booklet contemptuously to the floor of the House, he pronounced it “a shilling pamphlet hurled against eight hundred ships of war.”25

  The fact was that the British could do whatever they wanted. The fact was that for all of James Stephen’s outrage over American treachery in engaging in trade with France, Britain was perfectly happy to engage in the same trade herself. British merchant ships regularly carried goods to Napoleon’s empire; when Americans pointed out the utter hypocrisy of their stance, British defenders of maritime interests glibly replied with an argument that went little beyond the principle of might makes right. As the jingoistic London newspaper the Courier would put it, “The sea is ours, and we must maintain the doctrine that no nation, no fleet, no cock-boat shall sail upon it without our permission.” Even Lord Grenville, a leader of the opposition, seemed perplexed by American accusations of inconsistency. A certain amount of trade with the Continent and the French colonies had to proceed, even with the British blockade, he observed; and since Britain could not carry on her war against France without a strong economy, it was manifest that Britain should be the one to benefit from this inevitable trade. Grenville professed himself irritated by “the stress wh. Jefferson lays on the supposed unreasonableness of our claim to deprive other nations of a trade wh. we carry on ourselves.… we have a right to prevent that wh. is injurious to us, & may if we th
ink right relax that right in cases where we think the advantage to ourselves compensates or overbalances the injury.”

  In Washington, Merry, the British minister, confidently informed London after the Leander affair that America was too weak to take any meaningful action; a firm stand resisting any American claims would “only be attended by the salutary effect of commanding from the [American] Government the respect which they have recently lost toward Great Britain.”26

  Jefferson may have come to believe that a reinvigorated navy had become “indispensable,” but his long-standing ideological opposition to having a navy at all left him in a weak position to exercise much leadership on the subject. Jefferson had come into office in 1801 vowing to reduce debt, taxes, and expenditures, and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, puzzling over where to find $2.7 million to cut from the government’s $5 million annual spending—that was the amount he calculated would be needed to cover his planned reductions in the national debt—saw the navy’s $2.1 million as an irresistible target. Gallatin thought $1 million was a perfectly adequate figure for a navy to live with, insisting that America would gain more strength by reducing its debt than from anything a navy could do. The example of Britain showed the dangers of endless expenditure once a country started down the road of naval expansion: Britain had incurred a staggering debt of £300 million (about $1.3 billion) in building up its navy. Gallatin produced calculations for Congress proving that a navy always cost more than the value of the commerce it saved. Moreover, as a matter of basic principle, commercial interests had no claim to the government’s protection once they ventured beyond the territory of the United States. By the same token, a navy would be useless in defending American territory in the unlikely event of a seaborne invasion from abroad, since any nation that could carry out such an attack would have to possess a fleet of such overwhelming might that no American navy could possibly contend with it.27

  In his first year in office Jefferson hatched one of his usual fantastic schemes, an eight-hundred-foot-long dry dock that would hold the entire American navy in storage until it was needed again. Excavated out of the banks of the Eastern Branch of the Potomac (now the Anacostia River) east of the Washington Navy Yard, the dock would fill the entire area between Ninth and Tenth streets from the river to the intersection of Georgia and Virginia avenues. Covered with a sheet-iron roof—like the Paris corn market, Jefferson suggested—as many as twelve frigates could thus be preserved indefinitely in a state of suspended animation, “under the eye of the executive administration” and safely beyond the temptations of military adventurism. Congress predictably balked at the half-million-dollar cost of the project, but the Republican majority gladly went along with the slashing cutbacks in the navy Jefferson and Gallatin proposed along with it.

  In that political climate it was next to impossible to find anyone willing to serve as head of the Navy Department. At one point Jefferson joked, “I believe I shall have to advertise for a Secretary of the Navy.” Robert Smith, a Baltimore lawyer who finally agreed to take the position after four other men had turned it down, found that his first task was to write to two-thirds of the navy’s officers, dismissing them from the service in obedience to the terms of the naval Peace Establishment Act, passed by Congress in March 1801.28

  The Tripolitan war had brought a modest reversal in course, but with its end in June 1805, all but one of six original frigates authorized back in 1794—in the bill that had first created the United States navy—were being laid up or dismantled; only the Constitution remained on active service, in the Mediterranean. During the Quasi War with France the materials needed to build six seventy-four-gun ships of the line had been purchased, but the war ended before construction could begin, and for nearly a decade the timbers had been sitting in storage at the navy’s shipyards in Portsmouth, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Norfolk. The most Jefferson was willing to do now was diffidently observe to Congress that it was up to “the will of the Legislature” whether to build those ships.

  Edward Preble and several other navy officers went to Washington to lobby for the cause shortly after Congress began its session in December 1805, but Preble quickly saw it for the hopeless task it was. “What we are to do for a Navy,” he wrote his fellow captain James Barron, “God only knows.” Another naval officer surveyed the views of Congress in early 1806 and reported that “some of the gentlemen think the most economical plan is to let [the six frigates] rot; others to sell half for the repairs of three; and almost all are of the opinion that six seventy-fours would ruin the country.” When a bill authorizing construction of the ships of the line came up for a vote in late March 1806, it was defeated by a two-to-one margin. The amendments to the Peace Establishment Act that finally passed at the end of April limited the number of seamen on active duty to 925, cut the number of captains from 15 to 13, and authorized new expenditures of $400,000 for harbor defenses only. Most naval officers were already Federalists by inclination, and Republican opposition to the navy cemented their political allegiance. James Barron received a handwritten note from the president the next spring offering his “friendly salutations” and asking if Captain Barron might carry a letter for him to Malta and arrange for a pipe of Malta Madeira to be sent back to him. Barron scrawled a surly comment on the back: “From that infamous Hypocrite T. Jefferson.”

  Captain William Bainbridge requested and received a leave of absence from the navy in June 1806 to sail as a merchant captain, and a number of other experienced officers took the same course. Master Commandant Isaac Chauncey wrote Preble that he had obtained a furlough and was heading for China: “I see no prospect of Congress doing any thing for the Navy or officers therefore the sooner we can get good employ in private Ships the better at least for those who has no fortunes to depend on.”29

  Two hundred fifty thousand dollars of the congressional appropriation for harbor defenses was set aside for the construction of up to fifty small gunboats. These were another one of Jefferson’s hobbyhorses: small, one- or two-masted sloop-rigged vessels, typically no more than fifty feet long and eighteen or even ten feet wide, armed with one or two guns mounted on swivels; all in all, more like a Chesapeake oyster boat than a ship of war. The idea was that two hundred or so could be built cheaply and distributed up and down the coast to defend American harbors—fifty for Boston and other harbors north of Cape Cod, fifty for New York and Long Island Sound, twenty for the Chesapeake, twenty-five for Charleston and Savannah (Jefferson worked all the numbers out himself). In a calm they could be rowed with oars, and most of the time they could be manned by skeleton crews or even “hauled up under sheds” when not in use, Jefferson suggested.

  Jefferson thought them the perfect embodiment of republican ideals, the perfect answer to the deep-seated fear among his party’s faithful that a standing navy would be as dangerous an invitation to despotism as a standing army. American naval power, the Republicans insisted, would only entangle the nation in wars and foreign intrigues and do the bidding of the detested commercial classes and money men at the expense of the honest republican agrarians who were the backbone of American liberty and virtue. Contesting with the British navy on the high seas was impossible, and even were it not, it would only corrupt American values. “I deem it no sacrifice of dignity to say to the Leviathan of the deep: We are unable to contend with you in your own element,” Congressman Randolph proclaimed in one of the hours-long harangues he regularly delivered on the House floor.

  The American carrying trade was itself an evil by this way of thinking, not even worth trying to defend. Randolph derided it as “a mere fungus—a mushroom production of war in Europe” that would vanish as soon as peace between Britain and France returned and European shippers reclaimed their customary trade routes. Congressman George Washington Campbell of Tennessee went even further, ruing the day America ever first succumbed to the seductive vice of commerce: “It would have been well for us if the American flag had never floated on the ocean … t
o waft to this country the luxuries and vices of European nations, that effeminate and corrupt our people, to excite the jealousies and cupidity of those Powers whose existence, in a great degree, depends on commerce, and to court their aggressions and embroil us in their unjust and bloody contests.”30

  The gunboats, as Jefferson conceived of them, would answer most of these objections, or at least offer a palatable compromise that he thought most Republicans could swallow. Gunboats were obviously defensive, restricted to protecting American territory; since they could barely navigate open waters, they could never “become an excitement to engage in offensive maritime war.” They were thrifty: at $5,000 apiece, a mere one-fortieth the cost of a frigate or one-seventieth the cost of a ship of the line. They even could be manned in time of need by a kind of maritime citizen militia, Jefferson suggested.31

  The trouble was they were also ridiculous. In anything but a flat calm their guns proved impossible to aim with any reliability: even a light chop made the boats pitch and roll violently. In even moderate seas the guns had to be stowed below to keep the boats from capsizing from their top-heaviness; then it turned out that the recoil when the guns were fired in any direction other than nearly straight fore or aft also caused the boats to capsize. Their low gunwales afforded no protection to the crew from musket fire, while a single cannonball could reduce them to splinters.

  Even their economy swiftly proved illusory as construction costs doubled. While that still meant that twenty gunboats could be built for the price of one frigate, their manpower needs were no bargain at all; twenty gunboats required twice as many men, and five times as many officers, as a single frigate. It cost something like $120,000 a year to man and maintain one large frigate of fifty-six guns, three times that much for gunboats that carried an equivalent number of guns.32