Perilous Fight Read online

  Naval officers loathed the gunboats and complained that they undermined the only real system the navy had for bringing up young officers and teaching them the arts of seamanship and command: namely by having midshipmen enter the navy as adolescents and learn from the example of the senior captains they served under. But the gunboats, often captained by an officer no more senior than an older midshipman, provided no such opportunities and quickly acquired a reputation for lax discipline, or worse. Complaints of drunkenness and insubordination were rife. One distraught mother of a midshipman wrote to the secretary of the navy that aboard a gunboat her son had had “no opportunity to acquire a practical knowledge of his profession; he is exposed to the contagion of vicious example; gains not the advantage of discipline; forms not the valuable manners of an officer; and thus has every prospect for future service to his country blasted and destroyed.”

  When one gunboat capsized and sank in six fathoms of water, Stephen Decatur sarcastically asked, “What would be the real national loss if all gunboats were sunk in a hundred fathoms of water?”

  In the end, 177 would be built for $1.5 million. That would have bought the American navy eight new forty-four-gun frigates or five mighty seventy-four-gun ships of the line.33

  THE GROWING British harassment of American trade from 1804 on stirred American resentment, but what turned resentment into fury was a sudden increase in the longstanding and long-detested Royal Navy practice of seizing sailors from merchant ships and forcibly impressing them into British naval service. As the war with France created a surging demand for sailors to man the fleet, it became a daily occurrence for British warships to stop and board any passing American merchant vessels and pull off a few experienced seamen. That the British claimed the men it took were all British subjects did little to assuage American anger, especially since Britain arrogantly insisted that anyone born in Britain remained a British subject, forever owing allegiance to the British crown even if he had since become a naturalized American.

  Yet even during the colonial years Americans had loathed and at times violently resisted impressment. In November 1747 a press gang from a British man-of-war had come ashore in Boston and rounded up sailors, shipbuilders’ apprentices, and laboring land men, triggering three days of rioting. An angry mob of “seamen and other lewd and profligate persons … arm’d with cutlasses and other weapons,” as Massachusetts’s colonial governor indignantly put it, chased British naval officers through the streets and forced its way into the first floor of the town hall when the officers holed up there to try to escape. The rioters broke into the council chambers and hurled brickbats at the governor and his council, dragged off an undersheriff guarding the governor’s house and beat him and threw him in the town’s stocks, and hauled up a navy barge and threatened to set it on fire in the governor’s courtyard. The governor tried to call out the militia to quell the disturbance, but the militiamen refused to obey the order to muster.

  Declaring that he “did not think it consistent with the Honour of His Majesty’s Government to remain longer in the Midst of it,” the governor then ran for his life, taking shelter in Castle William, a stone fort manned by British army troops on one of the islands in the harbor. Eventually some of the impressed men were released in exchange for naval officers held hostage by the mob. Two decades later, in 1769, John Adams successfully defended an American sailor who killed the lieutenant of a British frigate when he tried to press him and other crewmen as their merchant ship was returning to Massachusetts after a voyage to Europe; the judge ruled it justifiable homicide.34

  The practice of impressing American seamen continued nonetheless. Even after the Revolution, British warships regularly took sailors out of passing American merchant vessels. Many crewmen on American ships were indeed British subjects, but the Royal Navy’s officers were never very particular when they needed a few prime hands to fill out their ship’s company. American consuls and notaries had begun to provide American seamen with certificates authenticating their citizenship specifically to protect them against the press, but British naval captains routinely brushed these proofs aside. “I could get one, if I was in America, for half a crown, as good as that,” sneered one Royal Navy captain when an American sailor showed him his certificate. Declaring an impressed American to be a Scotsman or Irishman was another favorite pretext; any sailor with a Mc or Mac or M’ in his name who protested against being pressed was almost certain to hear some variation on what was obviously a well-worn line making the rounds among Royal Navy officers, given how many times it was recounted by their victims: “Do you call yourself a Yankee, you damned Scotch rascal?” Another British captain said, “I have plenty like you on board and I do not believe you was ever in any part of the United States. You are either Scotch or Irish.”35

  The start of Britain’s war against Napoleon in 1803 turned an occasional annoyance into a major assault on American sovereignty. The Royal Navy’s manpower demands were proving insatiable: from 1803 on, the number of sailors and marines needed to man the fleet grew almost steadily at a rate of 12,000 year as the force more than doubled from 60,000 in 1803 to 145,000 by 1812.36 But even that did not tell the whole story because of the waves of desertions constantly taking place. To try to stem the loss of men, the navy instituted horrific punishments; deserters faced hanging or worse. James Durand, an American seaman who was trapped in the British service for six years after being pressed from a merchant ship in August 1809, witnessed one of these punishments carried out on a fellow American who had repeatedly tried to escape. He was sentenced to be whipped through the fleet, a total of three hundred lashes. The prisoner was stripped from the waist up, seized to a gallows erected in a large boat, and as the band played the rogue’s march was rowed from one warship to the next in the harbor. At each stop the boatswain’s mate of the ship came on board and delivered twenty-five lashes to the man’s bare back with the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was little but a long-drawn-out death sentence. “Alongside the last ship he expired under the brutality of the punishment,” Durand wrote. “So they gave his body ten lashes after he had died.”37

  But even that threat could not keep more than six thousand men from deserting each year, willing to risk the chance of draconian punishment rather than the certainty of the continued brutality of life aboard a man-of-war. Between the deserters, and the new ships to be manned, and the fifteen hundred men a year invalided out of the service from injury or sickness, the Royal Navy needed to find close to twenty thousand new men a year.38 A semibenevolent patriotic organization called the Marine Society offered to outfit destitute boys and men with a new suit of clothes and a few days of good food and tutoring if they would volunteer; that provided a thousand a year driven mostly by desperation. A few dreamy, naive young men from working families were drawn by visions of adventure—“I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over and longed for the sea,” said the son of an Edinburgh cooper who enlisted. But most of the “volunteers” were the so-called quota men that the magistrates of each county had to produce in two large drafts in 1795, supplemented in the following years by a steady stream of various small-time thieves, beggars, pickpockets, and other local nuisances from the local jails, including the occasional dissipated scion of a gentlemanly family who had fallen into drink, debt, or other dissolution that made getting out of the country as quickly as possible an attractive option.39

  Volunteers, willing and otherwise, could satisfy only a small fraction of what the navy needed during its rapid buildups. By 1800 the Impress Service was a permanent institution, commanding the full-time services of one admiral, forty-seven captains, and eighty lieutenants whose job it was to make up the difference. “Gentlemen,” officers of merchant ships at sea, and sometimes fishermen were exempt from the press, but otherwise the law permitted the navy to forcibly take any “persons using the sea.” That generally meant merchant seamen, but in practice it was interpreted imaginatively. Impress officers routinely declared that a man who had just been dragged
in off the streets of a seaport town “looked like” a sailor, and that was good enough.40 Merchant ships at sea were in many ways the favorite target of the press, however, since they were sure to contain experienced sailors. A Royal Navy captain almost never passed up the chance to press a few “prime seamen” from a passing ship.

  In London, James Monroe’s consulate was soon inundated with pleas from friends and families of American seamen who had been forcibly taken into British service. The American agent for seamen in London tallied 6,057 American sailors who had applied for release from the Royal Navy from 1803 to 1810, and the American secretary of state reported 200 more cases that had been filed directly with his office.41 Although the British government professed itself willing to discharge American citizens who had been wrongfully impressed, a sailor trying to get his release from the Royal Navy faced a Kafkaesque series of obstacles. To start with, any impressed man who accepted pay was deemed to have “volunteered” and thus was ineligible for release. James Durand had been grabbed in his sleep belowdecks on a merchant brig in Plymouth harbor by a press gang that had come alongside in a boat from the frigate Narcissus and forced to leave behind all his clothes, money, and papers. A few days later the captain summoned him to the quarterdeck and offered him five pounds if he would enter the ship’s company. When Durand protested that he was an American, the captain replied, “If you will not work I’ll flog you until you’re glad to set about it. Go below, for I won’t hear another word out of you.” Below he found twelve other Americans who had been impressed earlier; one said he had been given four dozen lashes, and advised Durand to do as the captain bid him.

  All manner of dodges were used to keep improperly impressed Americans from having their cases heard. Samuel Dalton of Salem, who was taken by the British in 1803, wrote letter after letter to his family and American consuls, desperately trying to have proofs of his citizenship forwarded to the Admiralty, and was thwarted at every turn. His mail was intercepted; when the American consul in London tried to file for a writ of habeas corpus, the magistrate kept rejecting it on technical grounds. First the magistrate said there was no evidence that Dalton actually was serving in His Majesty’s navy. The consul filed a deposition from a fellow seaman attesting that he had seen Dalton aboard the British ship of the line Namur. The magistrate rejected that petition because the seaman had not attested that Dalton had asked him to help secure his release. The consul obtained another deposition from the witness, only to have it rejected this time on the grounds that the man had not sworn that he believed Dalton was an American. “I am like a man that is out of his mind,” Dalton wrote his mother six years into what would be an eleven-year ordeal to obtain his freedom.

  Britain’s naval supporters noisily defended impressment as a self-evident necessity, a right founded on “immemorial usage,” and dismissed American protests as “almost ridiculous” given the “right which we undoubtedly possess of reclaiming runaway seamen.” Ceding the right to stop and search American ships and remove British sailors would create a safe haven for deserters, they insisted. Many British writers also insisted that any supposed American sailors taken in the press were in fact native-born Britons, and that the entire dispute between the two countries over impressment turned largely on their differing definitions of nationality and the right of naturalization. In fact, however, just the opposite was the case; nearly all of the American citizens seized in the press had been born in the United States.42

  The figure 6,257 began to appear in large outline type in Republican newspapers as American public outrage smoldered. Many of the British ships that invested American ports, seizing returning American merchantmen as prizes, also started pressing men out of them while they were at it. Each day’s shipping news contained reports of men taken: the ship Hannah and Elizah of New Bedford bound for New Holland on a whaling voyage, forced to put back after the Leander took ten of her crew; the brig William, three seamen and three passengers pressed by Leander; the ship Actress, sailed from New York and forced to return, having had two of her best seamen taken off by Leander; the schooner Swallow sailing in company with Nancy from Baltimore, boarded by the British frigate La Desiree, which impressed three men from Swallow and thirteen from Nancy; twelve fishermen from Salem and Marblehead impressed on the banks by the English frigate Ville de Milan. Once in a while a ship ordered to Halifax was retaken en route when the American crew overpowered their captors and put back into an American port, but there was no resisting the British boarding parties that pulled men off as a frigate stood by, its entire broadside of guns run out, smoldering matches at the ready.43

  There was obviously a spurious precision to the 6,257 figure, and both at the time and later there would be much controversy over the true number of impressed American sailors, but the best analysis suggests that it was not far off that widely popularized number. By 1812 the British had ordered the release of nearly 2,000 Americans who successfully protested their impressment; nearly 2,000 more Americans forcibly serving on British warships were discharged from service and held as enemy prisoners at the start of the war in 1812. So even by Britain’s own definitions and admission, 4,000 was a bare minimum for the number of American citizens forced since 1803 to serve against their will in the Royal Navy. The true figure may easily have been as high as 8,000 or 10,000.44

  A bill introduced in Congress in the 1806 session sought to define impressment as piracy, punishable by death. Representative Randolph, nothing if not consistent, opposed any such American efforts as empty gestures and argued that British impressment only offered a further demonstration of the inherent evils of a standing navy: an American navy would soon be forced to adopt the same detestable practice to fill its ranks.45

  Others with a keener grasp of public opinion and the dynamics of the relations between nations recognized the British behavior for the political dynamite it was, the galling humiliation to national sovereignty it represented. “That an officer from a foreign ship should pronounce any person he pleased, on board an American ship on the high seas, not to be an American Citizen, but a British subject, & carry his interested decision on the most important of all questions to a freeman into execution on the spot is so anomalous in principle, so grievous in practice, and so abominable in abuse, that the pretension must finally yield,” wrote Madison, summing up the case.

  More to the point was John Quincy Adams. “The practice of impressment,” he said, “is the only ineradicable wound, which, if persisted in, can terminate no otherwise than by war.”46

  THE UNITED States frigate Chesapeake had been laid up “in ordinary”—out of service but still officially in commission—for four years in the navy yard in Washington when William Henry Allen received orders at the end of January 1807 to join her as third lieutenant. The ship was being brought back into service to finally relieve the Constitution, which had remained on station in the Mediterranean ever since the end of the Tripolitan war. On her way she was to deliver to Minorca the new American consul, a naval surgeon named Dr. John Bullus, who was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson’s.

  The first order of business for the officers was to ship a crew. Henry Allen traveled to Philadelphia to try to find up to 170 seamen and boys; other recruiters went to New York and Norfolk. By the end of March, Allen had managed to get 47 men aboard a packet boat safely on their way to join the ship, but it had not been easy. “My guardian genius of good fortune certainly slumbered a little when she suffered me to be sent here,” Allen wrote his father. “What do you think of 60 or 80 Sailors, no doubt some of them wild Irishmen, let loose in this city after you have advanced them from 18 to 70 dollars each … I never had so much trouble with a pack of rascals in my life.” Of the 57 men he finally recruited, he had to release one after the man’s wife appeared, begging for his release and “overpersuaded me”; three others proved to be unfit for one reason or another, and six disappeared with the advance pay Allen had given them.47

  By May 9, when the Chesapeake at last set out from
the navy yard, she was still 60 men short. During the transit from Washington to Norfolk, where the ship was to complete her final fitting out for sea, 60 to 85 men were sick the entire time from a virulent infection that had torn through the crew. At nine in the morning of the first day, less than a mile into the two-hundred-mile first leg of her voyage, the frigate struck and grounded on the sandbar where the Eastern Branch joins the Potomac. A day of heaving off with the anchors was followed by a day of unloading supplies and shot onto a tender. On the seventeenth the green crew was trying to strike down the fore topgallant yard to fix a line that had been improperly rigged when the spar came loose and crashed to the deck, killing two crewmen and seriously injuring a third. A few days later another seaman fell overboard and drowned. Three of the sick men died over the next two weeks; a dozen of the crew made off with the ship’s boats and deserted; then the ship struck on Mattawoman shoals farther down the Potomac, and the cable broke when the crew tried to heave the ship off using a stern anchor. On June 4 she finally arrived at Hampton Roads. But there were other, deeper problems with this ship, which the crew was already feeling was cursed with ill luck: tensions between the officers and their captain, incomprehensible lapses in routine preparations of the ship’s armaments, chaotic arrangements for accommodating passengers who kept being added to the ship’s charge.

  The ship’s senior officer was James Barron. At age thirty-nine he was one of the navy’s senior captains, having been advanced to the rank in 1799 at the same time as Edward Preble and John Rodgers. He was an expert seaman from a maritime family; his father had been the commander in chief of Virginia’s state navy during the Revolution, his older brother Samuel was a commodore in the Mediterranean during the Tripolitan war, where Barron had served too, as captain of the frigate President. He was, however, said to be more of a seaman than a fighting man. He had seen no fighting in either the Quasi War or the Mediterranean, his duties never seeming to go beyond routine patrolling. That was not necessarily his fault, but whether as cause or effect, he seemed to lack the rage for glory that drove so many of his fellow officers.