by Robert Booth
He submitted a fulsome proposal to Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton and to former President Jefferson requesting that he be given a couple of ships and some men and supplies to visit the west coast and secure American territory there. To his astonishment, they had no interest. Denied his Pacific fantasy, Porter informed Secretary Hamilton that he intended to leave the navy if he was not given a promotion. Hamilton counseled patience and held out the prospect of Porter’s commanding one of the navy’s twelve real battleships. He assured Porter that a war was coming soon.
England, dominating the high seas in its war with France, had continued to exercise its treaty right to detain American ships and inspect them for contraband and to impress any English-born sailors found on board. The French were far more damaging to American interests: Napoleon, who controlled all the ports of Continental Europe, engaged in wholesale impoundment of American vessels and their cargoes, leaving the owners without any hope of recovery. Consequently, Federalist ship owners—residing mainly in New York and New England—had many reasons to hate the French, while Jefferson and his successor as president as of 1809, James Madison, heads of the pro-French Democratic-Republican Party, inflamed the public by exaggerating the extent of British impressment of American sailors.
At that time the United States had a population of about seven million, of whom one million were enslaved. Other than neutrality, the government had no foreign policy and no overseas ambitions, but change was coming out of the West, where several new territories had been claimed, reaching across the Mississippi all the way to the disputed Oregon frontier. Clearly, the country was destined to become enormous both in geography and in population, with ceaseless waves of pioneers peopling the regions soon to become new states.
In 1811, Henry Clay of Kentucky, avatar of this western future, became speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and began pushing hard for Congress to drop neutrality and declare war on Britain. He and his adherents in the Democratic-Republican Party aimed to drive the British out of North America—to take Canada and the Great Lakes regions—and to push the Native American peoples, clients of the British, across the Mississippi. Under a banner of “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” the war party’s operatives agitated in the seaports, hoping to extend their political base into enough of the old states to win a resolution in Congress.
War was indeed on its way, and Commander Porter, still arguing for a captaincy, agreed to take on the eleven-year-old Essex despite his deep dissatisfaction with the vessel and with a perceived lack of respect from the Navy Department. He felt that the Essex was not fast enough and had the wrong armament—too many carronades, good only for close-in smashing, and too few long guns for engaging a distant opponent. He demanded a transfer to a different vessel and even wrote a confidant that the navy secretary was an incompetent drunkard who owed him a small fortune.
Porter finally won his coveted promotion to captain despite a notorious gaffe in New York. While preparing the Essex for sea, he allowed his men to tar and feather a patriotic fellow sailor and throw him into the street for the crime of being born in England and thus unable to swear an oath against his home country. The public outcry in Manhattan was loud enough to disturb Porter’s superiors—“I do exceedingly regret that an officer of your high rank and intelligence should have permitted the proceeding in question,” wrote Secretary Hamilton—but they could not afford to lose him. The lack of experienced naval commanders was one of the many indicators that the country was unprepared for the war it was rushing into.
Privately, Porter was fanatical about many aspects of the upcoming conflict. The war planners, he thought, were crazy to want to invade Canada—it was not “the most noble and dignified” way to oppose Britannia, which he considered vulnerable on the very waves she claimed to rule. He imagined oceans lit up by the fires of burning British merchantmen, and American naval vessels falling like wolves upon hapless fleets while somehow the Royal Navy missed the action. Despite the irrational quality of this vision, Porter believed fervently that the undersized U.S. Navy could do more damage to imperial Britain by interfering with its vital maritime trade than by harassing its vastly superior navy or sending armies across a border.
And he was furious at the role to be played by American privateers. Consumed by his hallucination of a free-ranging, unstoppable navy, he could not abide the thought of a large private force consisting of hundreds of well-armed vessels of all sizes, widely dispersed and preying at will on the enemy’s shipping. “I detest the idea of trusting to our privateers for the destruction of British commerce,” he wrote to a friend. “Are we to become a nation of buccaneers, a nest of villains, a detestable set of pirates? When a general system of piracy is countenanced by our government, when the whole maritime defense of a nation consists of buccaneers, farewell national honor, farewell national pride!”
But no matter how much he might wish it otherwise, the enormous, well-protected, worldwide commerce of the British Empire could not be significantly affected by a tiny navy, and a privateer fleet was the only means of expanding American sea power. Porter’s red-hot temper and his ungovernable jealousy continued to blind him. He was certain that he was right, and anyone who disagreed with him was stupid or a traitor, including the navy secretary: “I shall persevere,” he declared. “It is noble to struggle against the gods.”
*The Porters were not, as has been claimed elsewhere, a Boston family. David’s father came from Delaware, and his mother was the daughter of an immigrant. David Porter was born February 1, 1780, in Medford, Massachusetts, near Boston, the son of David Porter (1754–1808), a Delawarean then privateering out of Boston, and Margaret Henry (1755–1801), born in Boston, the daughter of a blacksmith from Scotland.
*Whale oil, and especially sperm-whale oil, was a superior source of lighting, but it was in no way essential to British manufacturing, claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
Chapter Two
Consul General Poinsett
When Commander Porter had been departing New Orleans in 1809, Joel Roberts Poinsett, Esq., had been leaving France after a stay of several years in Europe. A young gentleman of independent means, possessed of elegant manners and martial dignity, Poinsett was nearly unique among Americans of his time. He had spent most of his adult life in foreign countries, without any affiliations or obligations, living out the remarkable conceit of a self-invented patrician military officer and roving amateur diplomat.
Poinsett’s journey had begun early. When only thirteen, he had been sent north by his wealthy and ambitious Charleston parents to be educated in Connecticut by the famous traveler and author Reverend Timothy Dwight, soon to become president of Yale.* Three years later, Poinsett boarded a ship for London, his mother’s native city, and there he studied at his uncle’s private school before going on to Edinburgh, Scotland, to begin college and follow his father into the medical profession.
But continuous intensive study laid him low, and after recuperating in Lisbon, he returned to England with a plan to satisfy his strong sense of patriotism and his desire for personal glory. A career as a soldier—no doubt culminating as a general of armies—would assure him of adventure and activity as well as responsibility commensurate with his ego. Subsequently he received private instruction in military science and engineering, but once again he fell ill. He retreated to Charleston for the first time since boyhood, hoping to join the peacetime army, but instead his father arranged for him to read the law. Chafing against the drudgery of legal studies, Poinsett finally persuaded Doctor Poinsett, by then a widower, to send his only surviving son on another voyage across the Atlantic in 1801 to make the grand tour of the capitals of Europe.
So ended the first phase of the remarkable career of Joel Roberts Poinsett, during which his foreign travels and mastery of several languages and subjects, from law to medicine to warfare, made him the talk of Charleston. What was he preparing for? Where would it end? He made no answer; he had become a gentleman and a scholar, true,
but that was merely a prelude to his next role, in which he would realize the fantasy of living heroically in Europe, challenging himself to have grand adventures and see amazing sights, to discuss policy with statesmen and princes, to attend the salons of deep thinkers and great writers, to be the first to represent his country in remote and exotic places. Long before the days of Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence, this rather frail young American decided to risk everything in order to see what one man, alone in the world, could learn—and perhaps achieve. He would spend most of the next eight years abroad, and father and son would never meet again.
In Paris, Poinsett studied the arts of statecraft, war, and the wielding of power as exemplified by Napoleon, self-made emperor of France and general of its ever-victorious armies. French civilization was superior in many ways; as an American patriot, Poinsett intended to observe what made it great and what he could take away to apply at home, both to advance his own career and to improve the government and military of his country.
After a few months he took to the field, hiking from Switzerland through Savoy and Italy, visiting counts and philosophers. Armed only with letters of introduction, he beguiled his way into rarefied settings where rank and privilege had always prevailed but where all were willing to set aside their biases in order to host a real American. To them, Poinsett personified the intelligence and vigor of the New World; from them, he gathered an appreciation of the art, manners, culture, and conversation of the Old. Returning to France, he went on to march with republican militiamen in Switzerland and to visit Robert Livingston, the American minister to France. He and Livingston spent a few weeks near Geneva as guests of the crumbling old financier Jacques Necker, whose dismissal as France’s minister of finance by King Louis XVI in 1789 had provoked the storming of the Bastille. By the time of Poinsett’s visit, Necker was living his final days in lofty exile with his doting daughter, Napoleon’s nemesis, the famous author Madame de Staël.
Having absorbed a great deal of Napoleonic lore and added substantially to his knowledge of American policy and diplomacy, Poinsett departed for Austria, footing it through Bavaria to Vienna, where he found a place at the imperial court. Learning there of the death of his father, he sailed for America and arrived just as his only sister Susan contracted a fatal illness. With her death he inherited a large fortune. He traveled in Canada and in the American Northeast, then spent a few months in Charleston as an aide to Governor Charles Pinckney, who made him a major in the state militia.
In 1807, with his impersonation now perfected by a South Carolina uniform as gaudy as a costume from an operetta, Poinsett returned to Europe and this time introduced himself in Saint Petersburg, the capital of Russia, where he was received by the new czar, Alexander. A strapping fellow Poinsett’s own age, Alexander happily granted a place at court to this new man from across the seas. Poised, gallant, and multilingual, Colonel Poinsett, by all appearances an officer of the American army, soon became a popular member of the glittering inner circle of nobles and military men at the palace, many of them Russian but others from all over Europe, driven into exile by Bonaparte and hoping for vengeance. Alexander, allied with Britain against the French, spoke with Poinsett about American political principles and came away impressed. “Were I not an emperor,” he averred, “I would certainly be a republican!”
Alexander offered his American military friend a high post in the Russian army, but Poinsett wavered. In all of his wanderings, he had remained certain that the United States was the true hope of the world; now, fearing a loss of his identity, he declined Alexander’s offer of command but accepted his invitation to conduct a fact-finding mission to the frontiers of the empire as his personal representative. Accompanied by an English friend, his manservant Sam, and an eight-man Cossack bodyguard, Poinsett entered a large carriage and began a journey over hundreds of miles through the forests south to Moscow, and then hundreds more across the steppes to the Volga, then down toward the Caspian city of Astrachan, the mart and resort of all the westward-trending caravans of Asia.
Heading southeast into the nomadic territories of Persia, Poinsett risked his life several times and witnessed many sights previously unseen by American eyes. Finally he turned toward the setting sun and reentered the war-torn frontiers of his own ancestral Europe. Bored by a Russian army siege in Armenia, he traversed the mountains to the Black Sea and then rode steadily across the steppes and through the forests back to the palace at Saint Petersburg. Only three of his eight companions survived the trip, and Poinsett himself, after reporting to the czar, decided to head for the healing waters of the hot springs at Teplitz. There he met the Prussian monarchs in exile, stunned at the defeat of their army by Napoleon and happy to enjoy the diversion of Poinsett’s thrilling tales. The queen described her shame at having had to beg Napoleon for an armistice, and the king observed that, while “he could not have expected to terminate a disastrous war by an advantageous peace,” still he had expected assistance from his ally the czar, who, after suffering initial defeats by French forces, had changed sides and accepted Napoleon’s gift of a piece of Prussia.
Poinsett returned to Paris and eagerly followed news of the brilliant French campaign against Austria, ending in the capture of Vienna and in Bonaparte’s marriage to its princess. He read about the British haplessly fighting Napoleon in Spain, and he correctly predicted their defeat—although they would regroup and renew their invasion later. He studied military science with a special focus on cavalry tactics, and he took private fencing lessons from one of Napoleon’s generals, the amused survivor of a botched assassination attempt by the emperor himself.
Full of Europe, Poinsett returned to the United States in 1809 to seek a place in the upper echelons of the military at Washington, D.C. His rather high appraisal of self-worth was not misplaced. Through his Charleston friend Thomas Sumter Jr., the new ambassador to Brazil, he was re-introduced to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, President Madison’s closest advisor. To Gallatin’s surprise, Poinsett passed along to him a proposal from Czar Alexander for a Russian-American partnership in the Pacific Northwest to fend off the British Canadians. Madison met with Poinsett but decided not to pursue it; he was more interested in the American Southeast. Poinsett made a strong impression, however. No other American could match his knowledge of the current state of Europe, and John Quincy Adams, the first American minister to Russia, would report that the czarina had suggested that the elegant Colonel Poinsett be made an ambassador.
President Madison and his cabinet had begun looking seriously at ongoing revolutionary events in Spanish America. Madison, only dimly aware of the extent of these independence movements, had no great desire to challenge Spain except in the Floridas—the big Florida peninsula in the east, and the coastal regions of what are now Mississippi and Alabama in the west. He had decided that these places, adjoining American states and territories, needed to be acquired before the British or French could do so. His opportunity came in June 1810 when word arrived that Francisco Miranda and others at Caracas had called for all of Spanish America to follow them into rebellion against Spain. Rather than wait for an insurrection in West Florida, Madison planned to annex by proclamation.
In the course of these maneuverings, Madison and Gallatin conferred about the news from South America. Creoles, the native-born descendants of Spanish settlers, had declared independence in Buenos Aires and in Mexico City, as in Caracas. American merchant shippers were already engaged in a large business at Caracas and Buenos Aires, at Rio in Brazil, at Veracruz in Mexico, and in many other Caribbean ports, including Havana. With Spanish America starting to fracture, the United States, with its maritime commerce imperiled, remained a noncombatant in the world war, while Great Britain, in particular, began to militarize in the western hemisphere.
Britain, building its empire through conquest and alliance, had made Brazil a client state by rescuing the Portuguese royal family from Napoleon. Rio de Janeiro was the new imperial capital of King Joao and his wi
fe, Carlotta, sister of the imprisoned king of Spain, and Britain’s large naval base at Rio ensured its domination of the South Atlantic. Madison agreed with Gallatin that it was time to start monitoring events from the inside. They tasked Secretary of State Robert Smith with hiring three men to serve as spies. Foremost was Smith’s old friend Captain William Shaler, author, mariner, and smuggler on the coast of Chile, who was given the Mexican assignment, while Robert Lowry of Baltimore was assigned the post in Caracas. They sailed in June 1810. When the candidate for the Buenos Aires job reneged, Secretary Gallatin thought of the ambitious fellow from Charleston.*
By mid-August 1810, Gallatin reported to President Madison, “I have found a gentleman who appears to me peculiarly fitted in every respect for the undertaking [in Buenos Aires]. It is Mr. Poinsett of South Carolina, with whose intellect, information, and standing you are already acquainted.” Poinsett’s mastery of French and Spanish would serve him well in a polyglot setting. Moreover, he combined independent wealth with committed patriotism; “his object being reputation and not money, there is no fear of his thinking of monopolies and private speculations instead of applying his whole time and faculties to the public objects.”
Gallatin noted that Poinsett wished for a military appointment at home, and had agreed to this mission out of a sense of patriotic duty, not preference. His absence in South America, he hoped, might “not be prejudicial to any promotion” into a top army position if the United States should engage in a war. Given “the difficulty of obtaining agents perfectly qualified and willing to go,” Gallatin persuaded Madison to expand Poinsett’s responsibilities to include Peru and Chile, on the Pacific side of the continent.
The new secret agent sailed for Rio in October 1810 and arrived at Buenos Aires in February 1811. There, he did his job exceedingly well, spying and fomenting amid the imperial designs of Europeans and the rebel aspirations of the Creoles. His hosts in Argentina had been the first to establish an independent state, having overthrown the Spanish viceroy’s rule in May 1810. For eight months Poinsett worked with this rebel government, rulers of the huge United Provinces—modern Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Argentina—to advance American interests and block the British. As a secret agent, he regularly filed exemplary reports on commerce, politics, geography, and demographics, but it was as a provocateur that he truly excelled.
