Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

The ship finally made it into Boston harbor on October 21, the third attempt.

  With immense relief, Humphreys received a letter in September 1798 from Captain John Barry practically ecstatic with praise for the United States. She had finally made her way down the Delaware and out to sea after more than a year of additional delays from accidents, febrile illness that had swept Philadelphia, and problems in fitting out and recruiting a crew. “No ship ever went to sea steers and works better, and in point of sailing, I have every reason to believe, she is equal, if not superior to any I ever saw,” Barry wrote. “I have seen nothing that I could not with the greatest ease outsail, and in a sea, an easier vessel perhaps never spread canvas.”16 The second of the frigates to be launched, Baltimore’s Constellation, received equally high praise from her officers; she “steered like a boat,” running ahead of everything as she dropped down Chesapeake Bay in a strong wind.17

  In June 1798, during the Quasi War, Congress authorized the construction of several more warships, to be funded by public subscriptions in the leading maritime towns and repaid by government bonds yielding 6 percent interest. Five smaller frigates resulted from the effort: the thirty-six-gun Philadelphia, the thirty-two-gun New York and Essex (the latter the contribution of Salem), and the twenty-eight-gun Boston and John Adams (the latter from Charleston). None were especially innovative designs, hewing closely to contemporary Royal Navy models, but they were all well-built ships that helped spread the know-how of warship construction, not to mention support for the new American navy, along the American seaboard.18

  THE LAST full year of Thomas Jefferson’s second term, 1808, found William Bainbridge in Portland, Maine, assigned to oversee the building of gunboats and enforce a series of wildly unpopular measures that the president and the Republicans thought would force Britain to recognize American rights. Jefferson remained convinced that America possessed a powerful weapon in economic coercion; limiting or banning America’s oceangoing trade would deliver British concessions without recourse to war.

  John Randolph offered up his usual scorn. Supporters of trade restrictions, he said, wanted “to cure the corns by cutting off the toes.” Subsequent events only seemed to confirm his cynicism. American exports and re-exports, which had reached $108 million in 1807, plummeted to $22 million in 1808 after Jefferson’s embargo of all American oceangoing trade with Europe or European colonies went into effect. A few towns were especially hard hit; a fifth of the residents of Salem were said to be reduced to beggary and the pastor of the town’s East Church, Dr. William Bentley, noted in his diary that more than a thousand of the town’s citizens were being fed each day at a soup kitchen supported by public subscription.

  To the American navy fell the unsavory task of stopping violations of the laws, halting and turning back American ships, and seeing through the myriad ruses that American ship’s captains inventively created to get around the restrictions. This did not make Bainbridge a popular man in Portland. It would not have been the most lively place to live in the best of times, but his job added a social awkwardness and isolation to his stay there. He wrote to a friend begging for news and said he could “promise in return to keep you informed of the price of codfish & potatoes.”19

  What made the duty all the more galling was that the trade restrictions were so shot through with loopholes and exceptions and hesitations, even as they gave navy and customs officers ever more coercive powers, that it all seemed an exercise in arbitrary futility; a few merchants were severely punished while others carried on better business than ever. One of the first measures banned British imports but then went on to exempt those items that America could not get anywhere else—in other words, precisely the things that Britain profited the most by in trading with America, such as Jamaican rum, coarse woolens, and Birmingham hardware. The subsequent embargo on American trade included an exemption that allowed any American merchant with property abroad to send a ship for it; that resulted in 594 departures from American ports. After that loophole expired, American coasting vessels kept showing up in Caribbean or even European ports, their captains maintaining with perfectly straight faces that they had been blown across the ocean by bad weather. Benjamin W. Crowninshield, who like his brother Jacob was prominent in the family shipping business in Salem, told Treasury Secretary Gallatin about several such incidents he had heard about. In one case the ship Hope put into Havana on the excuse that her mainmast had been split by lightning. The “lightning” turned out to have been a keg of powder set off in the mast, accidentally killing a crewman in the bargain.20

  Meanwhile, foreign depredations on American shipping intensified. Despite endless diplomatic negotiations in London and Washington, Britain had only escalated its clampdown on American trade. Since 1807 a series of orders in council—proclamations issued by the British government through royal prerogative—had in effect abrogated Britain’s adherence to the international law of neutrality by barring all neutral trade with the Continent. The only exceptions were for merchant ships that first put into a British port and obtained a British license to proceed. Napoleon retaliated with edicts banning neutral vessels from calling at French-controlled ports if they had touched first at a British port. American shippers were now damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. Each of the warring European powers admitted that its act was contrary to the law of nations, but justified it as a retaliatory response to the other’s illegal acts. By the end of 1811 the total number of American ships seized since 1803 was approaching the 1,500 mark, divided roughly two to one between Britain and France.21

  What made it all the more obnoxious was that, in practice, the orders in council only seemed to reinforce the obvious conclusion that Britain’s real aim was not so much to deny France trade but to make sure Britain benefited from whatever trade occurred. The British government sold as many as twenty thousand licenses a year to shippers who wanted to trade with the French Empire; bought and sold on the open market, they fetched up to £15,000 apiece. The blockade, justified as a military necessity, was looking an awful lot like a system simply of legalized extortion.22

  In the 1808 U.S. elections the Federalists doubled their seats in the House of Representatives, and though still a minority, the party was riding a rising a tide of New England resentment over the embargo. Behind the parties’ differing economic and regional interests lay a bitter class and cultural divide that gave their disagreements an increasingly ugly tone. Federalists looked at Jefferson’s supporters and saw an irresponsible—and hypocritical—rabble that spouted stock phrases about egalitarianism while defending slavery, that was always willing to rattle the sabers toward Britain but never willing to raise taxes to pay for the navy, and that had replaced the virtuous selflessness of the Revolutionary generation with a politics of crude and self-interested demagoguery.

  The Republicans for their part saw the Federalists as Anglophile elitists out to impose “monarchical” tyranny upon America, and could point to the Federalists’ own glaring hypocrisies. Though they had borne the brunt of Britain’s seizure and impressment policies, New England’s merchants also had the most to lose from war with Britain and the total loss of trade that would result, and so were constantly making excuses for Britain’s actions. Federalist writers even tried to claim that only a handful of American sailors had ever been impressed, or that it was the nefarious doing of a few American merchant captains who connived to have their sailors pressed toward the end of a voyage to avoid paying them.23

  Still, between the Federalists who wanted a navy but not to oppose Britain with and the Republicans who wanted to oppose Britain but not with a navy, enough votes emerged between the two parties to override Gallatin’s furious objections and approve a modest naval expansion. In January 1809 Congress passed “an act authorizing the employment of an additional naval force” that tripled the number of seamen to 3,600 and the number of midshipmen to 450, and ordered four of the frigates that had been in ordinary for years immediately fitted out and made ready for s
ea to join the frigates Constitution and Chesapeake in active service. Sixteen Republican senators and some forty House Republicans, largely from New England, joined the Federalists in passing the measure. Gallatin fumed about “the navy coalition of 1809, by whom were sacrificed … the Republican cause itself, and the people of the United States, to a system of favoritism, extravagance, parade, and folly.”24

  By a much wider margin Federalists and disaffected Republicans joined forces in both houses to repeal the ineffectual embargo. In an unmistakable parting shot, they chose to make Jefferson’s by now much-hated law expire the same day as his presidency, March 4, 1809.

  As ONE OF his first official acts, the new president, James Madison, named Paul Hamilton as his secretary of the navy. Hamilton was an unknown, a former governor of South Carolina, a man with no experience of ships or the sea. But one of his early acts was to order the four frigates and several smaller seagoing vessels now in service organized into a Northern Squadron under Rodgers and a Southern Squadron under Decatur and begin regular sea patrols. Their ostensible mission was to protect the American coastal trade, but Hamilton meant to send a more important message, and he did: the American navy was no longer going to be a passive bystander to British and French encroachments on American home waters.

  Hamilton also began cautiously pointing out to Congress that a navy built around gunboats and always kept in port was scarcely a navy at all, nor could it even be the seed of one. In June 1809 he told the Senate:

  Much must depend on the species of policy which, in the event of war, may be adopted. If … a plan of operations merely defensive shall be pursued, there can be no doubt that gunboats will aid materially, if properly stationed; but, if, on the contrary, our marine should be directed against a foreign trade, and to the convoying and protection of our own, a system of well armed, fast sailing, frigates, and small cruisers, would, on every principle, be preferable in point of effect, and, comparatively rated per gun and number of men to be employed, would be much less costly. It must also be observed that it is only on board vessels suited for sea service that good seamen are to be formed, and that those calculated merely for ports afford no opportunity for improvement in naval science.25

  Whatever complex blend of circumstances and politics had led to it, American naval officers began to see a glimmer of light: the navy was back at sea at last. As William Bainbridge wrote David Porter later that year, “You may rest assured of one fact, that we have an excellent secretary and that he is a most zealous friend of the navy.”26

  No one wanted to be caught napping again, and all the American commanders took advantage of their patrols up and down the coast to drill their crews and inculcate in them a new, unmistakably aggressive posture. In March 1810 the President, under William Bainbridge’s command, chased the British sloop of war Squirrel off Charleston bar. In June, Hamilton reinforced the navy’s resolve to confront the British in American waters with an order sent to all his captains:

  You, like every other patriotic American, have observed and deeply felt the injuries and insults heaped on our Country … Amongst these stands most conspicuous the inhuman and dastardly attack on our Frigate the Chesapeake—an outrage which prostrated the flag of our Country and has imposed on the American people, cause of ceaseless mourning. That same spirit which has originated and has refused atonement for this act of brutal injustice, still exists with Great Britain.… What has been perpetrated may again be attempted. It is therefore, our duty to be prepared and determined at every hazard, to vindicate the injured honor of our Navy, and revive the drooping Spirit of the Nation … offering yourself no unjust aggression, your to submit to none, not even a menace or threat from a force not materially your Superiour.27

  A summer cruise in 1810 uniting the entire American navy under Commodore Rodgers in a small show of force was planned, and Midshipman Henry Gilliam, aboard the Constitution, wrote his uncle that the secretary’s orders had been read aloud to the frigate’s assembled crew. Capturing the new spirit of determination that the Chesapeake’s surrender never be repeated, Gilliam said, “The General orders from the Navy department to Comr. R is not to suffer the smallest insult whatever to the Squaderon under his Command … but to resent it with all the force he can.… if so I am confident the Amer flag will never be struck until it has made a defence worthy of republicans.” And Decatur, now in command of the frigate United States, promptly replied to Hamilton, “Your instructions … have infused new life into the officers. No new indignity will pass with impunity.”28

  The following May, in 1811, on a dark night off Cape Henry, Virginia, Commodore Rodgers in command of the frigate President encountered and exchanged shots with a strange warship. Rodgers had made it publicly known that he was on the lookout for the British frigate Guerriere, which had been reported stopping American ships and pressing American seamen. No one would ever agree who hailed first or who fired first, and while the evidence slightly favored Rodgers’s account, it was also evident he was spoiling for a fight. When the firing was done, the small British sloop of war Little Belt had sustained heavy damage along with nine dead and twenty-three wounded.

  Recriminations flew across the Atlantic, and British commentators emphasized the unequal odds of the fight, but in writing to Rodgers, Secretary Hamilton could not contain his satisfaction over the “chastisement, which you have very properly inflicted.” He begged Rodgers to let him know the name of the one wounded boy aboard the President so that he might “hug him to my bosom (whatever may be his condition, or circumstance in life), while I made him an officer in the American Navy.”29

  Equally rapturous cheers echoed from American newspapers, exulting that the score with “the Leviathan of the deep” and the “mistress of the seas” had been evened at last, no matter the details and circumstances.

  JAMES MADISON was an easy man to underestimate. At five foot four, the fourth president of the United States stood a foot shorter than Washington or Jefferson and weighed little over a hundred pounds. He habitually dressed in sober black, which made more than one observer think of “a schoolteacher dressed up for a funeral.”30 More comfortable in his own company than in society, given to hypochondriac anxieties about his nerves and health, he was forty-four before he again summoned his courage to approach a woman after having been jilted twelve years earlier on his very first attempt. Even on this second try he had sent Aaron Burr to act as an intermediary, to inquire if the twenty-seven-year-old widow Dolley Payne Todd might be interested in him. To his infinite relief she was, and they made a devoted if odd couple, she enthusiastically fulfilling the social duties that he always dreaded.

  Madison had a thorough and logical mind; he was able to master the most complex subjects, develop ideas, invest countless hours writing and rewriting; but as the historian Garry Wills observed, he always preferred to let others get the attention: “He worked best not merely in committee but in secret.” He was the anonymous voice of the most persuasive papers of The Federalist that rallied public opinion in favor of the Constitution, the unnamed author of pamphlets that bolstered Jefferson’s presidency; he had even ghostwritten George Washington’s first inaugural address, the House’s reply to Washington’s address, and then Washington’s thank-you reply to the House. He had, said political friends and enemies alike, the naivety of a man who, unacquainted with the world, works out the perfect solution at his desk and is baffled when the world does not agree.

  At his inaugural ball the new president looked “spiritless and exhausted,” thought Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of the editor of the National Intelligencer and a keen early observer of Washington society. Jefferson was beaming, happy to pass on the office to a trusted colleague, but even happier to be formally free of the burdens of the job he had all but abdicated since the election, letting decisions drift as his eight-year policy of economic resistance to British outrages collapsed about him. When the managers of the ball appeared at the new president’s side to ask him to stay to supper, he wanly
assented, then turned to Mrs. Smith and blurted out, “But I would much rather be in bed.”

  It was not just Madison’s personality that was deceptive; everything about his political ideology seemed to point to a man who disparaged strong leadership and bold action. Madison had been the single strongest proponent of the embargo as an alternative to military confrontation; as secretary of state he had talked Jefferson into it, clung to it through all its inconsistencies, defended it even when the tide of Republican party feeling rose against it and repeal became inevitable. Even when Albert Gallatin had concluded that all America had accomplished with its weakly enforced trade restrictions was to parade its pusillanimity before the world—“I had rather encounter war itself than to display our impotence to enforce our laws,” he had conceded to Madison in 1808—Madison clung to a belief that his policy of peaceful coercion would ultimately bring Britain to relent.31 In his public writings he had always been true to the Jeffersonian article of faith on the inherent evil of war, not so much because of the destruction and killing that war entailed but because of the threat it posed to liberty at home. “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded,” Madison wrote in 1795 in his Political Observations. “War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”32

  What friends and enemies alike failed to grasp was that the kind of man who quietly worked out solutions to complex problems in the privacy of his study and his mind could be a man of stubborn resolve once he determined what those solutions were. And the fact was that as early as the spring of 1811 he had concluded that peaceful means would never bring Britain to respect American sovereignty and independence; no option remained but war. His challenge now was to slowly, cautiously, and deliberately build the political case for what would inevitably be seen as a total about-face in a policy that for a decade had been most closely associated with no one but Madison himself.