ALSO BY STEPHEN BUDIANSKY History The Bloody Shirt Her Majesty’s Spymaster Air Power Battle of Wits Natural History The Character of Cats The Truth About Dogs The Nature of Horses If a Lion Could Talk Nature’s Keepers The Covenant of the Wild Fiction Murder, by the Book For Children The World According to Horses THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Budiansky All rights reserved Published in the United States by Alfred A Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc Maps and diagrams by Dave Merrill Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Budiansky, Stephen Perilous fight: America’s intrepid war with Britain on the high seas, 1812–1815 / Stephen Budiansky.—1st ed p cm eISBN: 978-0-307-59518-8 United States—History—War of 1812—Naval operations United States—History, Naval—To 1900 I Title E360.B87 2010 973.5′2—dc22 2010037005 Jacket painting: Action Between USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere, 19 August 1812 by Anton Otto Fischer Courtesy Miss Katrina S Fischer U.S Naval Historical Center Photograph Jacket design by Joe Montgomery v3.1 Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright List of Maps and Diagrams Prologue In Barbary Honor’s Shoals “A Defence Worthy of Republicans” “The Present War, Unexpected, Unnecessary, and Ruinous” Photo Insert Love of Fame Is a Noble Passion Walls of Wood “You Shall Now Feel the Effects of War” The Far Side of the World Photo Insert “My Country I Fear Has Forgot Me” 10 Fortunes of War 11 “Praise to God for the Restoration of Peace” Notes Bibliography A Note About the Author Maps and Diagrams Theater of the war at sea, 1812–15 Tripoli Harbor, 1804 British and American men-of-war Sails and wind The United States vs the Macedonian, October 25, 1812 The Constitution vs the Java, December 29, 1812 Chesapeake Bay theater, 1813–14 Commerce-raiding cruises of the President and the Essex, 1812–14 Prologue MANY WARS have been called “the forgotten war”: those words have become a catchphrase much beloved of military historians seeking to excuse their obsession with obscurity But rarely was a war—or at least large parts of a war—forgotten with such swiftness, and such mutual determination, as the War of 1812 America and Britain both had things they wanted to forget, and forget quickly, about this often brutal three-year ght that raged across half a globe, from the wilderness of the northwestern forests to the capital cities of Canada and the United States, from the seas o Chile to the mouth of the English Channel The forgetting began almost as soon as the last shot was red, and it has been going on ever since It would be decades before the war even had a name; until the 1850s this war that left thirty thousand dead, that pushed the edgling American republic to the brink of bankruptcy and secession, that brought down some of the loftiest military reputations of the Revolutionary generation to ruin and disgrace, that saw hundreds of American citizens executed by ring squad for desertion, was most often just called “the late war” or “the late war with Great Britain.” “The War of 1812” came into widespread use only after the Mexican War of 1846–48 usurped the place of the “late war” in American memory It proved a memorable phrase, yet like “the late war,” it sidestepped any memory of why the war had been fought, or even whom it had been fought against.1 Americans above all wanted to forget the disastrously mismanaged land campaign, which had been marked from the start by miscalculation, blunders, incompetence, and monumental overcon dence No one had escaped humiliation; the wisest men had predicted easy success and quick victory, and had wound up with egg on their faces A month into the war Thomas Je erson, from his quiet retirement at Monticello, had smugly assured a fellow Republican politician that “the acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching.” One more year, Je erson added, would bring the “ nal expulsion of England from the American continent.”2 Two weeks after Je erson’s pronouncement, in the very opening of the o ensive against British forces to the north, the American brigadier general William Hull surrendered his entire army at Detroit without ring a shot He was subsequently courtmartialed, convicted of cowardice, and sentenced to be shot by a ring squad until President Madison granted him a reprieve based on his meritorious service in the Revolution DISASTER ON DISASTER ON LAND read the headlines in the anti-administration newspapers that winter as the debacles of the war’s opening months were repeated again and again.3 Along with the military blunders were a string of political embarrassments that both American political parties were eager to disown in the war’s aftermath Not until the Vietnam War a century and a half later would a decision to go to war so divide the nation, and impassioned feelings had led to many injudicious words and ill-considered stances The Federalists, the party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, whose stronghold was mercantile New England, had voted in Congress to a man to oppose the declaration of war, and were unsparing in their bitter denunciations Sermons preached week after week from northern Congregational pulpits added religious censure to the torrent of in ammatory words, warning that any “accomplice in the wickedness” of Mr Madison in such an iniquitous and unjust war would become a very murderer in the sight of God, “the blackest of crimes” on his conscience, “the guilt of blood upon his soul.” By the end of 1814 disunion was being bruited in the northeastern states But with the return of peace all such talk simply sounded wild, if not outright treasonous, and the Federalists desperately wanted to bury the recent political past.4 The Republicans had their own partisan excesses to live down, and they too quickly contracted a convenient case of amnesia, forgetting how for years they had denounced the very existence of an American navy as an evil of evils, a road to ruinous tyranny, an overweening Federalist ambition incompatible with the common-man values of a free republic On the very brink of the war that they were clamoring for, the Republican Congress had voted down a modest naval expansion that the Federalists had strongly backed And so the Federalists had opposed the war, the Republicans had opposed the navy, and so the one thing they could agree on after it was all over was how gloriously the tiny American navy had triumphed For decades afterward the whole complex history of the war was reduced to a simple romantic tale of patriotic pride and derring-do The stories of a few glorious single-ship actions fought by heroic American captains would be the story of the war to generations of Americans The glory was real and merited, yet it was a only a fraction of the story of the whole war, a fraction even of the story of the whole naval war But it was the part that would command almost all the attention whenever the War of 1812 was periodically revisited by popular writers, notably in 1882 by a young Theodore Roosevelt (who nearly two decades later would become assistant secretary of the navy) and in 1956 by the novelist C S Forester (who two decades earlier had begun to write his Horatio Hornblower stories) The one thing Americans could agree upon was precisely the one thing Great Britain wanted to forget: the humiliations her all-powerful Royal Navy had sustained on the high seas, the astonishing wounds to her prestige and pride she had su ered at the hands of the same upstart rival for the second time in thirty years And so this second war with America became little more than a footnote to the contemporaneous, and much more important, Napoleonic Wars In Britain too it became ever after a war without a real name, to this day something to be found in scholarly indexes under the musty title “Anglo-American War, 1812–15.” In his monumental fteen-hour-long television documentary of the history of Britain, the British historian Simon Schama devoted less than one sentence to the war Ask even a well-educated Briton today about the War of 1812 and you are likely to get a blank stare followed by a question about whether it has something to with the piece by Tchaikovsky Where amnesia induced by political expedience and national shame left o , the haze of quaintness took over Some of the nostalgia about the war was honestly come by: the world of sailing ships and sea battles would just a few generations later seem as remote and about as real as the Knights of the Round Table The historian Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, mused in his 1907 autobiography whether the “American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year than to the year 1900” in the world he was born into, in the education he received, and in the habits of mind he was inculcated with.5 Like the year 1854, the year 1812 was barely beyond the medieval in its technologies and its rhythms of life, in its lingering feudal codes of personal and family honor Nine-tenths of the seven million Americans alive in 1812 lived on farms, rising with the sun and going to bed with dusk, using tools unchanged for a thousand years; the rest lived in a few small cities of ten or twenty or thirty thousand hugging the Atlantic coast By the turn of the twentieth century literally everything had changed One can read the memoirs and letters of soldiers and seamen from World War II or even World War I and instantly know these men: they were our fathers and grandfathers; they looked on the world much as we do; their jokes may be corny but are never incomprehensible; the mechanized, ordered warfare they fought is awful but familiar The men of the War of 1812 can seem at times to be from another world entirely The archaic tools with which they waged war are almost the least of it; their assumptions, their motives, their ways of thinking take work to get our minds around The o cers who commanded America’s edgling navy of 1812 really did ght duels over tiny aspersions to honor, things we would literally laugh at today; they really did in the midst of war engage in the most astonishing acts of chivalry toward their foes; they really did endure su ering of an unspeakable blackness with a stoicism that can seem superhuman to a modern sensibility They also squabbled over money and promotions, lied and schemed, fornicated and drank, stabbed each other in the back when it suited them, and wrote very bad poetry One of the enduring reasons to study war is that it shines a light on humanity hidden in ordinary times; it lays bare what is so often successfully hidden And how they did reveal themselves, if we care to look: not just the o cers but the common men, too The American Civil War was the rst war in which the voice of the common soldier came to the fore, but a surprising number of ordinary American seamen from the War of 1812 were literate: 70 percent could sign their names, 30 percent with a practiced penmanship that clearly re ected formal schooling A good many of them wrote letters home, or kept journals that ranged from the pedestrian and the mechanical to the eloquent and the wry, and along with some shipboard o cers—these were mostly surgeons or chaplains—and a few of the more earnest midshipmen, some even possessed enough literary ambition to publish memoirs that, while they have to be taken with a Crowninshield, Jacob “Some Remarks on the American Trade: Jacob Crowninshield to James Madison, 1806.” Edited by John H Reinoehl William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser 16 (1959): 83–118 Dalton, Samuel “Letters of Samuel Dalton of Salem, an Impressed American Seaman.” Essex Institute Historical Collections 68 (1932): 321–29 Decatur, Susan Documents Relative to the Claim of Mrs Decatur: with Her Earnest Request that the Gentlemen of Congress Will Take the Trouble to Read Them Georgetown, D.C.: James C Dunn, 1826 Dunham, Josiah An oration delivered at Hanover, in the vicinity of Dartmouth college, before the several Washington benevolent societies of Hanover, Lebanon, Lime, Norwich, and Hartford, on the thirty-eighth anniversary of American independence Hanover, N.H.: Charles Spear, 1814 Dunlap, William Yankee Chronology, or Huzza for the Constitution—a Musical Interlude 1812 Reprint Tarrytown, N.Y.: William Abbatt, 1931 Durand, James R The Life and Adventures of James R Durand During a Period of Fifteen Years, from 1801 to 1816: In Which Time He Was Impressed on Board the British Fleet, and Held in Detestable Bondage for More Than Seven Years 1820 Reprint Sandwich, Mass.: Chapman Billies, 1995 Eggleston, George Cary, ed American War Ballads and Lyrics: A Collection of the Songs and Ballads of the Colonial Wars, the Revolution, the War of 1812–15, the War with Mexico, and the Civil War New York: G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1889 The Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship London: D Steel, 1794 Essex Institute American Vessels Captured by the British During the Revolution and War of 1812: The Records of the Vice-Admiralty Court at Halifax, Nova Scotia Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1911 Evans, Amos A “Journal Kept on Board the United States Frigate ‘Constitution,’ 1812, by Amos A Evans, Surgeon United States Navy.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 19 (1895): 152–69, 374–86, 468–80 Farragut, Loyall, and David Glasgow Farragut The Life of David Glasgow Farragut: First Admiral of the United States Navy, Embodying His Journal and Letters New York: D Appleton, 1879 Fay, H A Collection of the Official Accounts, in Detail, of All the Battles Fought by Sea and Land, Between the Navy and Army of the United States and the Navy and Army of Great Britain, During the Years 1812, 13, 14, & 15 New York: E Conrad, 1817 Firth, C H., ed Naval 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James Inderwick Edited by Victor Hugo Paltsits New York: New York Public Library, 1917 Isaacs, Nicholas Peter Twenty Years Before the Mast; or, Life in the Forecastle New York: Beckwith, 1845 James, William A Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War Between Great Britain and the United States of America London: T Egerton, 1817 The Naval History of Great Britain, from the Declaration of War by France in 1793, to the Accession of George IV Vol London: Richard Bentley, 1837 Jones, Noah [A Wanderer] Journals of Two Cruises Aboard the American Privateer Yankee New York: Macmillan, 1967 Lathrop, John The Present War Unexpected, Unnecessary, and Ruinous Two Discourses Delivered in Boston: The First on the 23d of July, 1812, the Fast Appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts; the Second on the 20th of August, the Fast Appointed by the President of the United States, in Consequence of the Present War Boston: J W Burditt, 1812 Latta, John E A Sermon Preached at 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Boston Daily Advertiser (Boston) Boston Gazette (Boston) Boston Patriot (Boston) Boston Post-Boy (Boston) City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston, S.C.) Columbian (New York) Columbian Centinel (Boston) Commercial Advertiser (New York) Connecticut Courant (Hartford, Conn.) Connecticut Herald (New Haven, Conn.) Connecticut Journal (New Haven, Conn.) Daily Advertiser (New York) Essex Register (Salem, Mass.) Federal Republican (Baltimore, Md., and Georgetown, D.C.) Hagers-Town Gazette (Hagerstown, Md.) National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.) Naval Chronicle (London) New-England Palladium (Boston) Newport Mercury (Newport, R.I.) New-York Gazette (New York) Port Folio (Philadelphia) Portland Gazette (Portland, Maine) Repertory (Boston) Republican Star (Easton, Md.) Repertory (Boston) Rhode-Island Republican (Newport, R.I.) Salem Gazette (Salem, Mass.) 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Navy’s Battle Doctrine in the War of 1812.” American Neptune 44 (1984): 171–78 Wells, William R “US Revenue Cutters Captured in the War of 1812.” American Neptune 58 (1998): 225–41 Wills, Garry James Madison New York: Times Books, 2002 Wilson, James Grant “Commodore Hull and the Constitution.” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 11 (1880): 101–13 Wood, Virginia Steele Live Oaking: Southern Timber for Tall Ships Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981 Zimmerman, James Fulton Impressment of American Seamen 1925 Reprint Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1966 A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEPHEN BUDIANSKY is a military historian and journalist whose writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic His previous books include The Bloody Shirt, Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Air Power, and Battle of Wits ... of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Budiansky, Stephen Perilous fight: America’s intrepid war with Britain on the high seas, 1812– 1815 / Stephen Budiansky. —1st ed p cm eISBN: 978-0-307-59518-8... World According to Horses THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Budiansky All rights reserved Published in the United States by Alfred A Knopf, a division of...ALSO BY STEPHEN BUDIANSKY History The Bloody Shirt Her Majesty’s Spymaster Air Power Battle of Wits Natural