Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  Reports of Jackson’s victory reached Washington on February 4, 1815, completely overshadowing the news of a few days earlier that Stephen Decatur had lost the frigate President to the British as he tried to bolt out of New York harbor during a winter storm on January 15.69 Decatur had received command of the President the previous April after it became clear that the New London squadron would never escape to sea; Rodgers was shifted to Philadelphia to take charge of the new frigate under construction there (named, both to honor the American victory and annoy the British, the Guerriere).

  It was no secret that Decatur would make the attempt. For weeks it was common knowledge that the President was preparing for sea and was only awaiting a good strong blow to knock the British squadron off station.70 The blow came on the fourteenth, but the British were ready, and even though the northwest wind had driven them fifty miles to the south, they were sitting off Long Island to the east when Decatur hove into view two miles away with dawn of the next day.

  It had been an ill-starred business from the start: the pilot taking them out of the harbor had miscalculated in the dark and run the President hard onto the bar past Sandy Hook, where the wind and sea violently beat the frigate against the bottom for an hour and a half before the rising tide finally freed her. And then Decatur stumbled right into a huge enemy force just before daylight; a blue signal rocket arced into the sky from one of the British ships; and within minutes he was running for his life from no fewer than three frigates, a brig, and the fifty-eight-gun razee Majestic. Decatur ordered the boats, cables, anchors, spare spars, and provisions thrown overboard, but it was clearly hopeless. The American frigate, her keel injured by the beating she had taken getting out of New York, was taking on water and was slowed by several knots. At one point in the chase Decatur proposed to his officers a desperate plan of boarding and seizing the Endymion, the British frigate that had succeeded in gaining the most on them, firing a howitzer down the hold of the President to scuttle her, then escaping in the captured British frigate, taking advantage of superior sailing qualities to run free of the rest of the enemy squadron. But the British captain of the Endymion never gave him a chance, staying well off his starboard quarter.

  And then the two ships were running in gunshot range and for two hours exchanged fire. All four of the President’s lieutenants were killed, including Archibald Hamilton, the son of the former secretary of the navy, the young officer who had dramatically arrived at the naval ball in Washington bearing the Macedonian’s colors two years before. The President’s marines fired five thousand musket cartridges; Decatur himself was twice hit by splinters that left him sprawled on the deck, in severe pain from a broken rib and pouring blood from a superficial but ghastly wound to his forehead. The chase and fight went on all day, from dawn to near midnight, before Decatur bowed to the inevitable and surrendered, loudly hailing that he surrendered “to the squadron”—meaning not to the Endymion alone. The President was taken to Bermuda, and Decatur was swiftly released on parole to arrive back in New London on February 21.71

  By then there was news that made any hairsplitting over the circumstances of one frigate’s surrender barely worth notice. GLORIOUS NEWS read the headline of an extra edition of the Commercial Advertiser that hit the streets of New York early on the Sunday morning of February 12, 1815: “A Treaty of Peace was signed by the American and British commissioners at Ghent, on the 24th of December.” The previous evening at eight o’clock a copy of the treaty had arrived in New York aboard the British sloop of war Favorite. When the news reached Hartford two days later, cannons were fired and bells rung throughout the night in rejoicing. In Albany 130,000 lights lit up the public buildings and fireworks filled the night sky. An express rider galloped to Boston in a record thirty-two hours, and schools closed, businesses shut, the legislature adjourned, and a parade of citizens with the word PEACE on their hats wound though the city. The Senate unanimously approved the treaty on February 16, and the next night at 11:00 p.m. Madison formally exchanged ratifications with the British envoy who had arrived to accept them. The following day in Washington the British and American flags flew side by side, and that night the impromptu celebration included the firing of a number of rockets, “some of them made, by one of our citizens, in imitation of the British Congreve.”

  In New Castle, Delaware, the Reverend John E. Latta preached a sermon on the nation’s improbable deliverance from the evils of war, declaring that, in simply surviving to see the return of peace, America had defied all expectation.

  Our national character was depreciated, as to what the nations of the world call honor and dignity. It was supposed, that we had lost the spirit of national independence, and that our martial genius and prowess, had sunk into a fatal degeneracy.… Under all these circumstances, we, novices in war, and unhappily divided amongst ourselves,—our enemies veterans,—flushed with recent victories—retaining a grudge and denouncing a vengeance, who would have ventured even to surmise an early peace?

  … The spirit of our beloved country, instead of being broken, is invigorated. The spirit, which contrived and executed the plan of our glorious independence, has been revived to defend it. Our citizens are inspired with a confidence, which will induce them to protect and defend, against all its enemies, the only government now existing in the world, which is worthy of a free, independent people.… We have more astonished the world in war, than we did in peace.72

  Only Federalist newspapers had the temerity to observe, in reading the actual terms of the treaty, that it offered nothing about free trade, sailors’ rights, or any other compensations for an expensive and bloody war.73

  Service celebrating the peace, Harvard University (Library of Congress)

  CHAPTER 11

  “Praise to God for the Restoration of Peace”

  NEWS OF the Treaty of Ghent reached the prisoners at Dartmoor on December 29, 1814, and on every one of the prison buildings the Americans hoisted a flag with the motto “Free Trade & Sailors Rights.” But the joy was brief. The winter of 1814–15 was the worst yet for the prisoners. A smallpox epidemic raged through the prison, made worse by the prison doctor’s theory that the best cure was cold baths and extinguishing the fires in the barracks, and so many more succumbed to pneumonia; 270 prisoners eventually died of disease, most during that final winter.

  As the weeks and then months wore on with no word about their release, the situation grew more and more volatile. Beasley, the American prisoner agent, sent a letter informing the prisoners that any who had contracted a debt and did not pay it would be detained in Britain. Then another letter arrived from Beasley stating that prisoners would be permitted to leave the country only aboard an official cartel ship, still offering no word about when the first ships would arrive.

  On February 13, 1815, a prisoner who had been confined in the “black hole” for eight months was allowed out to take exercise for two hours, leapt the picket fence into the prison yard, and was quickly ushered by his fellow prisoners into number 7. The next day Shortland demanded him back; the prisoners refused; and when three hundred soldiers then marched into the yard, the prisoners declared, in Benjamin Palmer’s words, that “they would never be forced in to any measure against their wills as long as there was a paving stone in the Yard to defend them.” Shortland ordered the soldiers back out but sent word that he would stop the market until the man was delivered up.1

  A new militia unit arrived to relieve one of the regiments that had been guarding the Americans, and immediately there was new trouble: a prisoner was stabbed four times by a bayonet apparently for not moving fast enough when the prisoners were ordered in at night. “Immediately prepared for Action against the morroe,” Palmer wrote in his diary March 8, “fully determined to sacrifice the first Soldier that came in to the Yard.” Shortland announced the next day that he would keep the soldiers out of the yard and the one who had stabbed the prisoner would received four hundred lashes as punishment.

  Everyone was cracking under t
he strain, and control of the prison seemed to be slipping day by day. A prisoner in the hospital “became insane & stabb’d two men.” Three Frenchmen “were Detected in the Act of buggery and this morning they were flog’d severely and turnd in to No 4 among the Negroes.” On March 25 the prisoners “tried” and hanged Beasley in effigy. “Still no prospect of getting home How is it that our Agent is so dilatory I cant tell,” Palmer wrote.2 On April 6 he added: “The Prisoners are growing daily more and more discontented. they seem determined to make some bold attempt to escape from this dam Prison.”

  Two days before, tensions had risen alarmingly when a dispute over the bread ration led to a stampede of prisoners out of all the barracks; they burst open the iron gates into the market square, and an alarm bell rang as soldiers from Princetown rushed to join the guards, who were now threatening to fire on the prisoners if they did not disperse. “Fire away!” the prisoners taunted back. Again an uneasy peace was restored.3 On the evening of the sixth the inevitable explosion occurred. Again some trivial incident was the trigger—a ball kicked into an adjoining yard by the prisoners, who then tried to retrieve it—but at around five o’clock in the afternoon the alarm bell rang, the guards turned out on the parapets, and before the prisoners could get to their barracks they began firing. Some of the prisoners later claimed that Shortland had engineered the entire episode, others that he was in the midst of the melee, raving drunk, shouting at the troops to fire, but in the chaos the truth would never be known for sure.4 Seven Americans were killed and thirty-one wounded.

  The incident finally shocked the British and American bureaucracies into action. Much of the delay in releasing the prisoners was due to the British government’s insistence that each side should supply the ships to return its own prisoners, which obviously was to Britain’s advantage given the imbalance in numbers. Now the British agreed to get the prisoners home as quickly as possible and work out the costs later. All Americans able to provide for themselves were released at once. Every day a contingent of freed prisoners could be seen on the road to Plymouth, marching with banners and flags inscribed “Remember the Sixth of April, 1815,” “Revenge Our Murdered Countrymen!” “Dartmoor Massacre, 1815,” and “Free Trade and Sailors Rights.”5

  More than one group of returning American sailors commandeered the ships taking them home when the captain tried to sail to a port far from where most of their homes were, redirecting the ships from Norfolk to New York or other ports.6 Most arrived home without money and barely with clothes. One recalled the “deep, burning indignation” he and the two or three hundred of his fellow released prisoners felt upon arriving in Boston and, after appealing for help from the town’s authorities, were given a dollar each and a certificate reading:

  This is to certify that ____________, having been a prisoner-of-war, has returned to this country destitute, and is anxious to get home to his family. We therefore recommend him to those upon whom he may call for assistance while on his journey.

  “Is this the reception given to men who have endured sufferings and privations unutterable,” the man indignantly observed, “who have fought their country’s battles, defended the fire-sides which these functionaries now enjoy in peace and security?” He scornfully tore up what he called the “begging-ticket” he had been offered and found his way home as he could, arriving there feeling “like Rip Van Winkle” awakened from his long and troubled sleep.7

  THE FEDERALISTS were certain that they would be the political winners of the war. The country had ended up with nothing Madison had promised and everything he claimed to abhor. The war had proved the Federalists right that America needed a strong navy and a sound system of taxation to pay for it; the peace had proved them right that it was folly to think that Britain could ever be made to yield its stance on impressment and free trade. The war had cost the country $158 million and left the government with a debt of $127 million—half as much again as the “moral canker” that Jefferson had inherited and vowed to eliminate, three times what the national debt stood at just before the war. The treaty that ended the war was an almost complete return to the status quo ante; in the end, the peace commissioners had chosen to deal with every single issue of serious contention between the two countries—from the major ones of impressment and free trade to a host of secondary issues such as British access to the Mississippi River and American fishing rights in Canada—by simply omitting any mention of them from the final text. “A Treaty, which gives us peace, is represented as glorious, when it has given us nothing else,” said Federalist senator Rufus King of Massachusetts.8 Senator Christopher Gore, his fellow Massachusetts Federalist, declared, “The treaty must be deemed disgraceful to the Government who made the war and the peace, and will be so adjudged by all, after the first effusions of joy at relief have subsided.”9

  But the amnesia that sets in after all wars took hold with lightning swiftness. Simply, no one wanted to hear that a war in which men fought and died had been in vain; no one wanted to be reminded of all the blunders and incompetence and miscalculations of the generals, or all the inconsistencies and opportunism of the politicians. Almost immediately the Republicans were declaring the war not merely an American triumph but a “second war of independence.” And almost immediately the Federalists found that facts were no match for the patriotic fervor that the war’s end had set loose. The Hartford Convention was what Americans now remembered of the Federalist party, not their stand for a strong navy or their opposition to a futile war; the very words “Hartford Convention” became a synonym for treason in the American political lexicon for years afterward, as did “blue lights.” By 1816 the Federalists had ceased to exist as a national party. “Democrat” had originated as a term of abuse for the Republicans, used by Federalists and the British because it carried the same disparaging connotation as “mob rule,” but the Republicans soon adopted it themselves, and for the next four decades the Democratic party would dominate American politics. James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison would all ride their party’s popularity, and their own service in the war, to the White House. The historian Donald Hickey tallied one future vice president, three governors, four United States senators, and twenty congressmen whose presence at Harrison’s victory at the Battle of the Thames was their ticket to public office as well.10

  Like the Federalists, many Britons were left sputtering and incredulous at American assertions of victory in the war. William James, a British admiralty court lawyer who was detained for part of the war in America and became almost unhinged over the American gloating he witnessed, quickly produced a popular account of the war that picked up where the editorials of the Times left off, belittling American naval triumphs and concluding that Americans were simply scoundrels who “will invent any falsehood, no matter how barefaced, to foist a valiant character on themselves.”11 In 1817 James’s book A Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War between Great Britain and the United States of America appeared, and he followed that with a huge six-volume history of the Royal Navy. The books contained a breathtaking number of inaccuracies regarding the size, force, armament, and character of the American navy but were most notable for the dripping anti-American sarcasm that filled page after page, all in the service of showing not only that the British navy had really won the war, but that in every instance when an American vessel had prevailed in battle, it was only as a result of superior force, cowardly tactics, and the employment of inhumane weapons such as bar and chain shot.

  Needless to say, the only thing such attacks succeeded in persuading Americans of was that the British were not only as arrogant as ever but sore losers as well. A deep-seated Anglophobia would be one of the most enduring legacies of the war in America; among American naval officers the tradition of antipathy and suspicion of the British that stemmed directly from the War of 1812 could still be seen as late as World War II.

  But British navy men on the whole took a more collected and deta
ched view of the war’s consequences, and saw the writing on the wall better and sooner than most. The war had heralded the rise of not only a new naval power but a new kind of naval warfare, more professional and less chivalric, based more on technical mastery and less on heroics. The old world, in which indignant remonstrations like James’s over who had the better of points of honor still mattered, was rapidly slipping into history, like it or not. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” declared the Naval Chronicle’s Albion in one final letter he wrote March 12, 1815, to “take my leave of the American contest” and offer a few measured observations: