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USS Constitution defeats HMS Guerriere; a significant event during the war.
Americans distrusted a standing army, but they regarded a navy as a dangerous extravagance that invited foreign adventurism while draining public coffers. After the Revolution, the government scrapped the U.S. Navy, and it did not again exist until 1794 when anxiety about preserving American neutrality and protecting American shipping recommended its revival. When Jefferson took office in 1801, he inherited this Federalist funded navy consisting of thirteen frigates and an additional six ships of the line under construction. Republican thrift and anti-navy prejudice stopped building on the ships of the line and dry-docked many of the frigates. Only seven of them remained seaworthy in 1812.
The Republican Party under Jefferson and Madison instead sponsored the construction of gunboats in the years before the War of 1812. About 174 of these small, narrow, shallow-draft vessels came off the ways between 1802 and 1812, and 62 were in service at the outbreak of the war. Designed for coastal defense, gunboats appealed to Republicans because they were cheap to build. Naval planners also conjectured that they would be cheap to maintain, although annual upkeep for a gunboat turned out to be about ten times that of a frigate. Furthermore, their performance during the war was largely disappointing, and many historians have criticized the reliance on gunboats as naïve. We should note, however, that neither the political establishment nor the public would have supported an expensive “blue water” navy in the years before the war. Indeed, Congress shied away from creating one even as the war began. When South Carolina War Hawk Langdon Cheves framed a bill that would have supplemented the navy with twelve new ships of the line and twenty additional frigates, Republicans rejected it.
The surviving seven frigates consequently were the backbone of the U.S. Navy as it went to war with the most powerful navy in the world. Still, as backbones go, this one was impressive, for three of these ships— the Constitution, the President, and the United States—were heavy frigates that boasted even more guns than their ample rating of 44 suggested. These “super frigates” were larger than European frigates. Built of live oak timbers heavy enough for a ship of the line, they could absorb enemy broadsides while answering with bigger guns that pounded opponents to pieces. Compared to British frigates, they were surprisingly nimble even for their size, and, if overmatched by a British ship of the line (twice the size and double the guns), the super frigate could run like a rabbit. Joining their large cousins were the 36-gun Constellation, Chesapeake, and Congress, the 32-gun Essex, and the Adams, whose refitting to 28 guns technically made her a corvette. Nine smaller vessels—sloops and brigs—carried 10 to 20 guns, so few that they could safely assail only merchantmen.
Such was the U.S. Navy at the outbreak of the war. Had it been only ships and guns, it would not have been enough, but the navy was more than a handful of ships. Experienced officers had seen action against the French in the Quasi-War and the Barbary Pirates in the Tripolitan War, and salt-hardened seamen were tough customers with weapons large and small. Ceaseless training honed their skills, and anything that crossed them was sorry for the experience, as several Royal Navy captains and crews were to discover.
For all its pluck, however, the American fleet was tiny when compared to the Royal Navy. The British had spent vast sums to build more than a thousand ships that patrolled the vast reaches of their world empire. The Americans did have an advantage in that the strain of touring the British Empire taxed even the Royal Navy, with the result that, in 1812, British ships were widely dispersed across all the world’s oceans. On North American station, only one ship of the line, nine frigates, and assorted lesser vessels made up the British naval presence. Fearful of Napoleon’s plans to reestablish a French fleet in European waters, the bulk of the Royal Navy remained there. The Royal Navy also was busy protecting shipping routes to supply British armies fighting in the Iberian Peninsula as well as West Indian and Canadian colonists. Accordingly, for the first year of the war, American waters saw only a small British naval presence.
Early Strategy
Aside from being a hopeless alcoholic who, according to some reports, never managed to see a sober afternoon, Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton was also incompetent. He endorsed the conventional view held by both Congress and the administration that the small U.S. Navy was too insignificant to challenge the Royal Navy. He planned to have ships remain in port where as floating batteries they would help repel invasions or, at Albert Gallatin’s suggestion, perform coastal service to protect the American merchant fleet.
Several captains opposed this timid plan, including William Bainbridge and Stephen Decatur, who wanted the navy to harass Britain’s commerce. Decatur’s idea of sending out ships singly only differed with that of Commodore John Rodgers in that Rodgers wanted to group ships in squadrons. When Congress declared war, the administration decided to apply the idea of Rodgers’s squadrons to Gallatin’s idea of coastal service. Rodgers and his squadron, however, had already left port for open water to chase a richly laden British convoy sailing out of Jamaica. He pursued it all the way to England, never to catch it, yet Rodgers’s cruise so alarmed the British that they spent valuable resources and time searching for him, a diversion that allowed many American merchant vessels to reach their homeports.
The Super Frigates Triumphant
The navy, especially the three super frigates, would provide the United States with the only bright pages of 1812’s otherwise dark military chapter. These began with an intrepid deed by William Hull’s nephew, Captain Isaac Hull, who commanded the USS Constitution.
Shortly after the declaration of war, Hull had left New York for open water where he had the misfortune to encounter the only British ship of the line in the hemisphere. Moreover, Hull had happened upon the Halifax squadron, for the 74-gun monster had four frigates with her. Clearly overmatched, Hull tried to run, but both the swift Constitution and her pursuers suddenly found themselves in a dead calm. For two days, Constitution’s crew first towed the frigate with small boats and then resorted to kedging (pulling her through shallow water with anchors). Hull was never beyond sight of the enemy squadron, which was doing the same thing he was. When a light wind teased his canvas, Hull had the crew haul buckets of water into the rigging to wet the sails, better to catch the breeze. The faster Constitution finally left her pursuers behind, and when she eventually appeared in Boston Harbor, a hero’s welcome awaited her officers and crew. Greater laurels were in store for this good ship and her crew.
Even before the celebrations had abated and, more important, before Hull received new orders, he put to sea again. About 600 miles out from Boston on 19 August, the Constitution spotted the frigate HMS Guerrière, commanded by Captain James R. Dacres, an officer noted for his contempt for the upstart Yankee navy. Dacres’s disdain turned to dismay as the Constitution proceeded to smash to pieces the Guerrière’s rigging and damage her hull in a two-hour fight that saw the two ships collide several times.7 Adjusting his opinion regarding American seafaring abilities, Captain Dacres finally had to admit defeat. During the battle, an American naval legend was born when one of Constitution’s crew watched cannon shot from the Guerrière inflict so little harm on the American frigate that he shouted: “Huzza, her sides are made of iron.”8 The Constitution to this day bears the nickname “Old Ironsides.”
Other frigates were not idle. On the morning of 25 October, the United States, commanded by Stephen Decatur, demolished the British frigate Macedonian about 600 miles west of the Canary Islands. For ninety minutes, British captain John S. Carden watched his gun crews bested in both rate of fire and accuracy. Worse for the Macedonian, the United States’ long-range firepower allowed Decatur to lay off beyond the range of Carden’s guns. Unmasted and with her decks slick with blood, the British frigate surrendered at 10:30 and was claimed as a prize by Decatur and his crew, the only time a British frigate was ever subjected to such a humiliation.
The Constitution—this time under the command of William Bainbridge—scored another triumph off the Brazilian coast on 29 December, when she encountered the British frigate Java en route to India. Java’s captain Henry Lambert was a first-rate sailor with a sound ship that was actually faster than his opponent, so he was confident of carrying the day. Lambert, in fact, closed on the Constitution three times to rake her with shot that beat her up badly, disabled her helm, and wounded Bainbridge twice. The perseverance and ingenuity of the Constitution’s officers and crew, however, finally gave her the opportunity to wreck the Java’s rigging and kill large portions of her crew, including Lambert.
The Militia of the Sea
Real injury was inflicted on British commerce during the war by a swarming group of privateers. The attraction of this type of warfare lay in its relatively high effectiveness for relatively little cost. Privateers were privately financed, and consequently small navy advocates looked upon them as performing a similar role at sea as the militia did on land. The difference was that privateers did not have to defend anything of importance; their sole reason for being was to assail and capture merchant vessels that were at best lightly armed and bring them into friendly ports for judgment. Such ports included not only those in the United States, for the French obligingly opened their ports to American privateering captures. Proceeds from captures were distributed to privateer crews and their investors, which was, some critics claimed, the main incentive for privateering in the first and last place. Critics also pointed out with some accuracy that lucrative privateering ventures drew off men needed for regular naval service.
These swift, small ships primarily stalked their quarry off the coast of Canada and in the West Indies, but some ranged to wherever they could find British shipping. By 1813, the Royal Navy countered by providing escorts to large groups of merchantmen sailing in convoy along the main shipping lanes in the Atlantic. Their effectiveness reduced, the privateers nonetheless continued to cause dismay among British shippers, for there were always stragglers from convoys and merchant vessels traveling the West Indies or near the British Isles remained easy prey.
The Tragedy of the Chesapeake
In 1813, James Lawrence took command of the Chesapeake, the same ship that had been involved in the impressment controversy with the Leopard six years earlier. By any estimation, the Chesapeake was an unhappy and unlucky ship whose career was marked by controversy and contention. When Lawrence took command of her, she was in Boston unable to fill out her crew because many of her disenchanted veterans had refused to reenlist. Lawrence scraped together a crew, but its members and the ship’s officers had little time to train together before the Chesapeake went into her last fight.
In the spring of 1813, the British frigate Shannon was cruising off the Massachusetts coast. Captain Philip Broke had commanded the Shannon for seven years and had molded the ship into his own image. The ship was meticulously maintained, and her crew was incessantly drilled to meet every event with automatic precision. Broke, unique in the Royal Navy for his insistence on constant gunnery exercises, had shaped the Shannon into a particularly lethal machine of destruction.
Broke knew that the Chesapeake was in Boston Harbor, and with the audacity customary to naval captains of the time, he issued a provocative challenge to Lawrence. The Chesapeake was already under way, and Lawrence did not receive the invitation, but he needed no summons to fight. The Shannon and the Chesapeake were evenly matched in rate and size, but the contrasting readiness of their crews should have been sobering for the American captain. As the commander of the Hornet, however, Lawrence had won several engagements against the Royal Navy, and his previous success amplified a tendency to impulsiveness.
On 1 June 1813, the Chesapeake came out of Boston Harbor and found the Shannon about eighteen miles off the coast. Lawrence stood on his quarterdeck in a dress uniform. Perhaps his inexperienced crew was the reason he did not exploit an opportunity to rake the Shannon as he approached her, but the two ships eventually lined up to blast one another with broadsides. The Shannon took a beating, but Broke’s gun crews did a better job of handing out punishment. In only fifteen minutes, both the Chesapeake and her crew were thoroughly shattered into submission. Lawrence did not see her boarded: fatally wounded, he had been taken below to die, but he had mustered enough strength to tell his crew: “Don’t give up the ship.”9 They were distressingly hopeless words under the circumstances.
The words would not die with Lawrence. The country took them up as a rallying cry. The navy adopted them as a motto. In only months, Lawrence’s navy would avenge his words “Don’t give up the ship” on an inland sea hundreds of miles from where they were uttered. On a banner fluttering over a U.S. Navy ship bearing his name, they would not be hopeless at all. They would be fighting words.
The Epic Voyage of the Essex
Any account of U.S. naval activity during the war must mention the fantastic exploits of the frigate Essex under the command of Captain David Porter. Although the ship was difficult to handle and handicapped by carrying mostly short-range guns, she made an adventurous cruise that ended only when confronted by insurmountable odds.
Departing the Delaware River in October 1812, the Essex sailed east to the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa before heading to the south Atlantic. Porter managed to take some prizes, but the thin hunting off the Argentine coast prompted him to the audacious move of taking his ship into the South Pacific, the first American naval vessel ever to ply those waters. The Essex rounded Cape Horn in late 1812, enduring in the process some of the most terrifying weather and cruelest seas of any place on earth. Porter then sailed Pacific waters for more than a year during which he ravaged the British whaling fleet. Thousands of miles from any safe haven, the Essex lived off her enemy captures and refitted in the Marquesas Islands at the end of 1813. For two months, Porter and his crew savored the pleasures of this South Sea paradise while engaging in a series of swashbuckling adventures worthy of the most exciting fiction.
Their days of bold and carefree action, however, were numbered. In late 1813, the British gave the job of capturing the Essex to Captain James Hillyar, equipping him with a three-ship squadron for the task. The Essex departed the Marquesas in mid-December and by March 1814, had arrived at Valparaiso, Chile. It was there that two of Hillyar’s ships, the Phoebe and the Cherub, caught up with her. Porter respected Chile’s neutrality by insisting that any contest occur outside the country’s territorial waters, but Hillyar was not so punctilious. The two British ships hovered just off the harbor. Porter tried to run for the open sea on 18 March 1814, but bad weather damaged his rigging, forcing him into a nearby bay. The Phoebe and Cherub bore down on him. Beyond the range of the Essex’s guns, the British ships inflicted terrible punishment on the disabled American frigate, and she had to surrender. It was hardly a creditable performance by the British—they had violated Chilean neutrality to assail a crippled opponent—but the long voyage of the Essex was at last over.
The Balance of Power
British naval dominance should have given her unchallenged command of the seas, while greater American numbers in North America should have provided an overwhelming advantage to U.S. military operations against Canada. American defeat in Canada surprised the U.S. government, and British defeats at sea stunned the Admiralty. England’s newspapers scurried to make excuses, such as claiming that the American super frigates were actually ships of the line unfairly sailing under a false classification. Such defenses offered only hollow comfort, however. Receiving news of the Java’s defeat, the British Admiralty gloomily (and secretly) issued orders that henceforth British frigates should avoid individual combat with American counterparts. During the first months of the war, the balance of naval power was clearly in the United States’ favor, and the consequent victories buoyed the nation stumbling under the weight of abysmal military performances on land, yet that would change because it was bound to.
Stung by criticism at home and worried about the prestige of the Royal Navy the world over, the Admiralty gradually strengthened squadrons in American waters and directed merchant vessels in the Atlantic to convoy their cargoes. The real shift in the balance of naval power occurred when Napoleon’s Russian campaign unraveled and sped the decline of France’s fortunes. The British developed an increasing naval presence in the American war that managed in 1813 to place ten ships of the line, thirty-eight frigates, and fifty-two support vessels on North American station. They were then able to bottle up the U.S. frigates in various ports, blockade significant stretches of the Atlantic coast, and launch amphibious raids, especially in Chesapeake Bay.
In the face of these discouraging developments, the Navy Department had to issue its own version of the British Admiralty’s instructions of a year earlier: American warships that could escape the British blockade were to sail independently and devote themselves exclusively to raids on British shipping. They were not to engage in battle unless sure of victory. Although a few more high seas battles took place, by 1814 the glory days of the freewheeling and seemingly invincible frigates were over.10 The navy would still play an important part in the war, but it would do so on inland waters with crucial victories on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. Those victories would come using ships that had not even been imagined when the indomitable Constitution claimed her first victim.
Notes
1. Quoted in Timothy D. Johnson, Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 15.
2. A comprehensive overview of the role of militia in U.S. history is John K. Mahon’s History of the Militia and National Guard (New York: Macmillan, 1982).
3. Jefferson is quoted in Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello, Vol. 6 of Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1981), 109.
4. The standard account of this campaign is Alec R. Gilpin’s General William Hull and the War on Detroit in 1812 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1949).
5. Quoted in Hickey, War of 1812, 82.
6. Quoted in Richard V. Barbuto, Niagara 1814: America Invades Canada (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 65.
7. Traditional accounts of this fight describe it as only taking about half an hour, but the Constitution’s foremost biographer has discovered that these rely on Hull’s report, which he revised to make him appear more skilled in combat. See Tyrone G. Martin, “Isaac Hull’s Victory Revisited,” The American Neptune 47 (winter 1987): 14–21.
8. Quoted in Hickey, War of 1812, 94.
9. Quoted in Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval War of 1812 (New York: Putnam, 1882; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 182.
10. American vessels were fighting engagements as late as 1815, though with mixed results. The President was forced to surrender in January 1815, but the Constitution continued its remarkable record by defeating the Cyane and the Levant in February 1815 after the ratification of the peace treaty. The last real naval combat of the war occurred in March 1815 when the USS Hornet defeated HMS Penguin near Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic.
by William James (Author)
