The day was unclouded, as if no incident should be wanting to crown the mind with melancholy and woe—the wind from the same direction and the sea presented the same unruffled surface as was exhibited to our anxious view when on that memorable first day of July we saw the immortal Lawrence proudly conducting his ship to action.... The brig Henry containing the precious relics lay at anchor in the harbor. They were placed in barges and, preceded by a long procession of boats filled with seamen uniformed in blue jackets and trousers, with a blue ribbon on their hats bearing the motto of "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights," were rowed by minute strokes to the end of India Wharf, where the bearers were ready to receive the honored dead. From the time the boats left the brig until the bodies were landed, the United States brig Rattlesnake and the brig Henry alternately fired minute guns... On arriving at the meeting-house the coffins were placed in the centre of the church by the seamen who rowed them ashore and who stood during the ceremony leaning upon them in an attitude of mourning. The church was decorated with cypress and evergreen, and the names of Lawrence and Ludlow appeared in gilded letters on the front of the pulpit.

It was wholly reasonable that the exploit of the Shannon should arouse fervid enthusiasm in the breast of every Briton. The wounds inflicted by Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge still rankled, but they were now forgotten and the loud British boastings equaled all the tales of Yankee brag. A member of Parliament declared that the "action which Broke fought with the Chesapeake was in every respect unexampled. It was not—and he knew it was a bold assertion which he made—to be surpassed by any other engagement which graced the naval annals of Great Britain." Admiral Warren was still in a peevish humor at the hard knocks inflicted on the Royal Navy when he wrote, in congratulating Captain Broke: "At this critical moment you could not have restored to the British naval service the preeminence it has always preserved, or contradicted in a more forcible manner the foul aspersions and calumnies of a conceited, boasting enemy than by the brilliant act you have performed. The relation of such an event restores the history of ancient times and will do more good to the service than it is possible to conceive."

Captain Broke was made a baronet and received other honors and awards which he handsomely deserved, but the wound he had suffered at the head of his boarding party disabled him for further sea duty. If the influence of the Constitution and the United States was far-reaching in improving the efficiency of the American navy, it can be said also that the victory of the Shannon taught the British service the value of rigorous attention to gunnery and a highly trained and disciplined personnel.

American chagrin was somewhat softened a few weeks later when two very small ships, the Enterprise and the Boxer, met in a spirited combat off the harbor of Portland, Maine, like two bantam cocks, and the Britisher was beaten in short order on September 5, 1813. The Enterprise had been a Yankee schooner in the war with Tripoli but had been subsequently altered to a square rig and had received more guns and men to worry the enemy's privateers. The brig-of-war was a kind of vessel heartily disliked by seamen and now vanished from blue water. The immortal Boatswain Chucks of Marryat proclaimed that "they would certainly damn their inventor to all eternity" and that "their common, low names, 'Pincher,' 'Thrasher,' 'Boxer,' 'Badger,' and all that sort, are quite good enough for them."

Commanding the Enterprise was Captain William Burrows, twenty-eight years old, who had seen only a month of active service in the war. Captain Samuel Blyth of the Boxer had worked his way up to this unimportant post after many years of arduous duty in the British navy. He might have declined a tussel with the Enterprise for his crew numbered only sixty-six men against a hundred and twenty, but he nailed his colors to the mainmast and remarked that they would never come down while there was any life in him.

The day was calm, the breeze fitful, and the little brigs drifted about each other until they lay within pistol shot. Then both loosed their broadsides, while the sailors shouted bravely, and both captains fell, Blyth killed instantly and Burrows mortally hurt but crying out that the flag must never be struck. There was no danger of this, for the Enterprise raked the British brig through and through until resistance was hopeless. Captain Blyth was as good as his word. He did not live to see his ensign torn down. Great hearts in little ships, these two captains were buried side by side in a churchyard which overlooks Casco Bay, and there you may read their epitaphs today.

The grim force of circumstances was beginning to alter the naval policy of the United States. Notwithstanding the dramatic successes, her flag was almost banished from the high seas by the close of the year 1813. The frigates Constellation, United States, and Macedonian were hemmed in port by the British blockade; the Adams and the Constitution were laid up for repairs; and the only formidable ships of war which roamed at large were the President, the Essex, and the Congress. The smaller vessels which had managed to slip seaward and which were of such immense value in destroying British commerce found that the system of convoying merchantmen in fleets of one hundred or two hundred sail had left the ocean almost bare of prizes. It was the habit of these convoys, however, to scatter as they neared their home ports, every skipper cracking on sail and the devil take the hindmost—a failing which has survived unto this day, and many a wrathful officer of an American cruiser or destroyer in the war against Germany could heartily echo the complaint of Nelson when he was a captain, "behaving as all convoys that ever I saw did, shamefully ill, and parting company every day."

This was the reason why American naval vessels and privateers left their own coasts and dared to rove in the English Channel, as Paul Jones had done in the Ranger a generation earlier. It was discovered that enemy merchantmen could be snapped up more easily within sight of their own shores than thousands of miles away. First to emphasize this fact in the War of 1812 was the naval brig Argus, Captain William H. Allen, which made a summer crossing and cruised for a month on end in the Irish Sea and in the chops of the Channel with a gorgeous recompense for her shameless audacity. England scolded herself red in the face while the saucy Argus captured twenty-seven ships and took her pick of their valuable cargoes. Her course could be traced by the blazing hulls that she left in her wake and this was how the British gun brig Pelican finally caught up with her.

Although the advantage of size and armament was with the Pelican, it was to be expected that the Argus would prove more than a match for her. The American commander, Captain Allen, had played a distinguished part in several of the most famous episodes of the navy. As third lieutenant of the Chesapeake, in 1807, he had picked up a live coal in the cook's galley, held it in his fingers, and so fired the only gun discharged against the Leopard in that inglorious surprise and surrender. As first officer of the frigate United States he received credit for the splendid gunnery which had overwhelmed the Macedonian, and he enjoyed the glory of bringing the prize to port. It was as a reward of merit that he was given command of the Argus. Alas, in this fight off the coast of Wales he lost both his ship and his life, and England had scored again. There was no ill-luck this time—nothing to plead in excuse. The American brig threw away a chance of victory because her shooting was amazingly bad, and instead of defending the deck with pistol, pike, and musket, when the boarders came over the bow the crew lowered the flag.

It was an early morning fight, on August 14, 1813, in which Captain Allen had his leg shot off within five minutes after the two brigs had engaged. He refused to be taken below, but loss of blood soon made him incapable of command, and presently his first lieutenant was stunned by a grapeshot which grazed his scalp. The ship was well sailed, however, and gained a position for raking the Pelican in deadly fashion, but the shot went wild and scarcely any harm was done. The British captain chose his own range and methodically made a wreck of the Argus in twenty minutes of smashing fire, working around her at will while not a gun returned his broadsides. Then he sheered close and was prepared to finish it on the deck of the Argus when she surrendered with twenty-three of her crew out of action. The Pelican was so little punished that only two men were killed. The officer left in command of the Argus laid this unhappy conclusion to "the superior size and metal of our opponent, and the fatigue which the crew underwent from a very rapid succession of prizes." There were those on board who blamed it to the casks of Oporto wine which had been taken out of the latest prize and which the sailors had secretly tapped. Honesty is the best policy, even in dealing with an enemy. The affair of the Argus and the Pelican was not calculated to inflate Yankee pride.

To balance this, however, came two brilliant actions by small ships. The new Peacock, named for the captured British brig, under Captain Lewis Warrington, stole past the blockade of New York. Off the Florida coast on the 29th of April she sighted a convoy and attacked the escort brig of eighteen guns, the Epervier. In this instance the behavior of the American vessel and her crew was supremely excellent and not a flaw could be found. They hulled the British brig forty-five times and made a shambles of her deck and did it with the loss of one man.

Even more sensational was the last cruise of the Wasp, Captain Johnston Blakely, which sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in May and roamed the English Channel to the dismay of all honest British merchantmen. The brig-of-war Reindeer endeavored to put an end to her career but nineteen minutes sufficed to finish an action in which the Wasp slaughtered half the British crew and thrice repelled boarders. This was no light task, for as Michael Scott, the British author of Tom Cringle's Log, candidly expressed it:

In the field, or grappling in mortal combat on the blood-slippery deck of an enemy's vessel, a British soldier or sailor is the bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of any other country, saving and excepting those damned Yankees, can stand against them... I don't like Americans. I never did and never shall like them. I have no wish to eat with them, drink with them, deal with or consort with them in any way; but let me tell the whole truth,—nor fight with them, were it not for the laurel to be acquired by overcoming an enemy so brave, determined, and alert, and every way so worthy of one's steel as they have always proved.

Refitting in a French port, the dashing Blakely took the Wasp to sea again and encountered a convoy in charge of a huge, lumbering ship of the line. Nothing daunted, the Wasp flitted in among the timid merchant ships and snatched a valuable prize laden with guns and military stores. Attempting to bag another, she was chased away by the indignant seventy-four and winged it in search of other quarry until she sighted four strange sails. Three of them were British war brigs in hot pursuit of a Yankee privateer, and Johnston Blakely was delighted to play a hand in the game. He selected his opponent, which happened to be the Avon, and overtook her in the darkness of evening. Before a strong wind they foamed side by side, while the guns flashed crimson beneath the shadowy gleam of tall canvas. Thus they ran for an hour and a half, and then the Avon signaled that she was beaten, with five guns dismounted, forty-two men dead or wounded, seven feet of water in the hold, the magazine flooded, and the spars and rigging almost destroyed.

Blakely was about to send a crew aboard when another hostile brig, forsaking the agile Yankee privateer, came up to help the Avon. The Wasp was perfectly willing to take on this second adversary, but just then a third British ship loomed through the obscurity, and the ocean seemed a trifle overpopulated for safety. Blakely ran off before the wind, compelled to abandon his prize. The Avon, however, was so badly battered that she went to the bottom before the wounded seamen could be removed from her. Thence the Wasp went to Madeira and was later reported as spoken near the Cape Verde Islands, but after that she vanished from blue water, erased by some tragic fate whose mystery was never solved. To the port of missing ships she carried brave Blakely and his men after a meteoric career which had swept her from one victory to another.

Of the frigates, only three saw action during the last two years of the war, and of these the President and the Essex were compelled to strike to superior forces of the enemy. The Constitution was lucky enough to gain the open sea in December, 1814, and fought her farewell battle with the frigate Cyane and the sloop-of-war Levant on the 20th of February. In this fight Captain Charles Stewart showed himself a gallant successor to Hull and Bainbridge. Together the two British ships were stronger than the Constitution, but Stewart cleverly hammered the one and then the other and captured both. Honor was also due the plucky little Levant, which, instead of taking to her heels, stood by to assist her larger comrade like a terrier at the throat of a wolf. It is interesting to note that the captains, English and American, had received word that peace had been declared, but without official confirmation they preferred to ignore it. The spirit which lent to naval warfare the spirit of the duel was too strong to let the opportunity pass.

The President was a victim of a continually increased naval strength by means of which Great Britain was able to strangle the seafaring trade and commerce of the United States as the war drew toward its close. Captain Decatur, who had taken command of this frigate, remarked "the great apprehension and danger" which New York felt, in common with the entire seaboard, and the anxiety of the city government that the crew of the ship should remain for defense of the port. Coastwise navigation was almost wholly suspended, and thousands of sloops and schooners feared to undertake voyages to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston. Instead of these, canvas-covered wagons struggled over the poor highways in continuous streams between New England and the Southern coast towns. This awkward result of the blockade moved the sense of humor of the Yankee rhymsters who placarded the wagons with such mottoes as "Free Trade and Oxen's Rights" and parodied Ye Mariners of England with the lines:

Ye wagoners of Freedom Whose chargers chew the cud, Whose wheels have braved a dozen years The gravel and the mud; Your glorious hawbucks yoke again To take another jag, And scud through the mud Where the heavy wheels do drag, Where the wagon creak is long and low And the jaded oxen lag.

Columbia needs no wooden walls, No ships where billows swell; Her march is like a terrapin's, Her home is in her shell. To guard her trade and sailor's rights, In woods she spreads her flag.

Such ribald nonsense, however, was unfair to a navy which had done magnificently well until smothered and suppressed by sheer weight of numbers. It was in January, 1815, that Captain Decatur finally sailed out of New York harbor in the hope of taking the President past the blockading division which had been driven offshore by a heavy northeast gale. The British ships were struggling back to their stations when they spied the Yankee frigate off the southern coast of Long Island. It was a stern chase, Decatur with a hostile squadron at his heels and unable to turn and fight because the odds were hopeless. The frigate Endymion was faster than her consorts and, as she came up alone, the President delayed to exchange broadsides before fleeing again with every sail set. Her speed had been impaired by stranding as she came out past Sandy Hook, else she might have out-footed the enemy. But soon the Pomone and the Tenedos, frigates of the class of the Shannon and the Guerriere, were in the hunt. Decatur was cornered, but his guns were served until a fifth of the crew were disabled, the ship was crippled, and a force fourfold greater than his own was closing in to annihilate him at its leisure. "I deemed it my duty to surrender," said he, and a noble American frigate, more formidable than the Constitution, was added to the list of the Royal Navy.



CHAPTER VIII

THE LAST CRUISE OF THE ESSEX

The last cruise of the Essex frigate, although an ill-fated one, makes a story far less mournful than that of the President. She was the first man-of-war to display the American flag in the wide waters of the Pacific. Her long and venturesome voyage is still regarded as one of the finest achievements of the navy, and it made secure the fame of Captain David Porter. The Essex has a peculiar right to be held in affectionate memory, apart from the very gallant manner of her ending, because into her very timbers were builded the faith and patriotism of the people of the New England seaport which had framed and launched her as a loan to the nation in an earlier time of stress.

At the end of the eighteenth century France had been the maritime enemy more hotly detested than England, and unofficial war existed with the "Terrible Republic." This situation was foreshadowed as early as 1798 by James McHenry, Secretary of War, when he indignantly announced to Congress: "To forbear under such circumstances from taking naval and military measures to secure our trade, defend our territories in case of invasion, and to prevent or suppress domestic insurrection would be to offer up the United States a certain prey to France and exhibit to the world a sad spectacle of national degradation and imbecility."

Congress thereupon resolved to build two dozen ships which should teach France to mend her manners on the high seas, but the Treasury was too poor to pay the million dollars which this modest navy was to cost. Subscription lists were therefore opened in several shipping towns, and private capital advanced the funds to put the needed frigates afloat. The Essex was promptly contributed by Salem, and the advertisement of the master builder is brave and resonant reading:

To Sons of Freedom! All true lovers of Liberty of your Country! Step forth and give your assistance in building the frigate to oppose French insolence and piracy. Let every man in possession of a white oak tree be ambitious to be foremost in hurrying down the timber to Salem where the noble structure is to be fabricated to maintain your rights upon the seas and make the name of America respected among the nations of the world. Your largest and longest trees are wanted, and the arms of them for knees and rising timber. Four trees are wanted for the keel which altogether will measure 146 feet in length and hew sixteen inches square.

The story of the building of the Essex is that of an aroused and reliant people. The great timbers were cut in the wood lots of the towns near by and were hauled through the snowy streets of Salem on ox-sleds while the people cheered them as they passed. The Essex was a Salem ship from keel to truck. Her cordage was made in three ropewalks. Captain Jonathan Haraden, the most famous Salem privateersman of the Revolution, made the rigging for the mainmast in his loft. The sails were cut from duck woven for the purpose in the mill on Broad Street and the ironwork was forged by Salem shipsmiths. When the huge hempen cables were ready to be conveyed to the frigate, the workmen hoisted them upon their shoulders and in procession marched to the music of fife and drum. In 1799, six months after the oak timbers had been standing trees, the Essex slid from the stocks into the harbor of old Salem. She was the handsomest and fastest American frigate of her day and when turned over to the Government, she cost what seemed at that day the very considerable amount of seventy-five thousand dollars.

Peace was patched up with France, however, and the Essex was compelled to pursue more humdrum paths, now in the Indian Ocean and again with the Mediterranean squadron, until war with England began in 1812. It was intended that Captain Porter should rendezvous with the Constitution and the Hornet in South American waters for a well-planned cruise against British commerce, but other engagements detained Bainbridge, notably his encounter with the Java, and so they missed each other by a thousand miles or so. Since he had no means of communication, it was characteristic of Porter to conclude to strike out for himself instead of wandering about in an uncertain search for his friends.

Porter conceived the bold plan of rounding the Horn and playing havoc with the British whaling fleet. This adventure would take him ten thousand miles from the nearest American port, but he reckoned that he could capture provisions enough to feed his crew and supplies to refit the ship. As a raid there was nothing to match this cruise until the Alabama ran amuck among the Yankee clippers and whaling barks half a century later. It was the wrong time of year to brave the foul weather of Cape Horn, however, and the Essex was battered and swept by one furious gale after another. But at last she won through, stout ship that she was, and her weary sailors found brief respite in the harbor of Valparaiso on March 14, 1813. Thence Porter headed up the coast, disguising the trim frigate so that she looked like a lubberly, high-pooped Spanish merchantman.

The luck of the navy was with the American captain for, as he went poking about the Galapagos Islands, he surprised three fine, large British whaling ships, all carrying guns and too useful to destroy. To one of them, the Georgiana, he shifted more guns, put a crew of forty men aboard under Lieutenant John Downes, ran up the American flag, and commissioned his prize as a cruiser. The other two he also manned—and now behold him, if you please, sailing the Pacific with a squadron of four good ships! Soon he ran down and captured two British letter-of-marque vessels, well armed and in fighting trim, and in a trice he had not a squadron but a fleet under his command, seven ships in all, mounting eighty guns and carrying three hundred and forty men and eighty prisoners. Two of these prizes he discovered to be crammed to the hatches with cordage, paint, tar, canvas, and fresh provisions. The list could not have been more acceptable if Captain David Porter himself had signed the requisition in the New York Navy Yard.

Lieutenant Downes was now sent off cruising by himself, and so well did he profit by his captain's example and precepts that in a little while he had bagged a squadron of his own, three ships with twenty-seven guns and seventy-five men. When he rejoined the flagship in a harbor of the mainland, Porter rewarded him by calling his cruiser the Essex, Junior, promoting him to the rank of commander, and increasing his armament. They then resumed cruising in two squadrons, finding more British ships and sending them into the neutral harbor of Valparaiso or home to the United States with precious cargoes of whale oil and bone. Within a few months he swept the Southern Pacific almost clean of British merchantmen, whalers, and privateers. Winter coming on, Porter then sailed to the pleasant Marquesas Islands and laid the Essex up for a thorough overhauling. The enemy had furnished all needful supplies and even the money to pay the wages of the officers and crew.

Fit for sea again, the Essex and the Essex, Junior, betook themselves to Valparaiso where they received information that the thirty-six-gun frigate Phoebe of the British navy was earnestly looking for them. She had been sent out from England to proceed to the northwest American coast and destroy the fur station at the mouth of the Columbia River. At Rio de Janeiro Captain Hillyar had heard reports of the ravages of the Essex and he considered it his business to hunt down this defiant Yankee. To make sure of success, he took the sloop-of-war Cherub along with him and, doubling the Horn, they made straight for Valparaiso. David Porter got wind of the pursuit but assumed that the Phoebe was alone. He made no attempt to avoid a meeting but on the contrary rather courted a fight with his old friend Hillyar, whom he had known socially on the Mediterranean station. For an officer of Porter's temper and training the capture of British whalers was a useful but by no means glorious employment. He believed the real vocation of a frigate of the American navy was to engage the enemy.

The Phoebe and the Cherub sailed into the Chilean roadstead in February, 1814, and found the Essex there. As Captain Hillyar was passing in to seek an anchorage, the mate of a British merchantman climbed aboard to tell him that the Essex was unprepared for attack and could be taken with ease. Her officers had given a ball the night before in honor of the Spanish dignitaries of Valparaiso, and the decks were still covered with awnings and gay with bunting and flags. Reluctant to forego such a tempting opportunity, Captain Hillyar ran in and luffed his frigate within a few yards of the Essex. To his disappointed surprise, the American fighting ship was ready for action on the instant. Though the punctilious restraints of a neutral port should have compelled them to delay battle, Porter was vigilant and took no chances. The liberty parties had been recalled from shore, the decks had been cleared, the gunners were sent to quarters with matches lighted, and the boarders were standing by the hammock nettings with cutlasses gripped. Making the best of this unexpected turn of events, the English captain shouted a greeting to David Porter and politely conveyed his compliments, adding that his own ship was also ready for action. So close were the two frigates at this moment that the jib-boom of the Phoebe hung over the bulwarks of the Essex, and Porter called out sharply that if so much as a rope was touched he would reply with a broadside. The urbane Captain Hillyar, perceiving his disadvantage, exclaimed, "I had no intention of coming so near you. I am very sorry indeed." With that he moved his ship to a respectful distance. Later he had a chat with Captain Porter ashore and, when asked if he intended to maintain the neutrality of the port, made haste to protest, "Sir, you have been so careful to observe the rules that I feel myself bound in honor to do the same."

After a few days the Phoebe and the Cherub left the harbor and watchfully waited outside, enforcing a strict blockade and determined to render the Essex harmless unless she should choose to sally out and fight. David Porter was an intrepid but not a reckless sailor. He had the faster frigate but he had unluckily changed her battery from the long guns to the more numerous but shorter range carronades. He was not afraid to risk a duel with the Phoebe even with this handicap in armament, but the sloop-of-war Cherub was a formidable vessel for her size and the Essex, Junior, which was only a converted merchantman, was of small account in a hammer-and-tongs action between naval ships.

For his part, Captain Hillyar had no intention of letting the Yankee frigate escape him. "He was an old disciple of Nelson," observes Mahan, "fully imbued with the teaching that the achievement of success and not personal glory must dictate action. Having a well established reputation for courage and conduct, he intended to leave nothing to the chances of fortune which might decide a combat between equals. He therefore would accept no provocation to fight without the Cherub. His duty was to destroy the Essex with the least possible loss."

Porter endured this vexatious situation for six weeks and then, learning that other British frigates were on his trail, determined to escape to the open sea. This decision involved waiting for the most favorable moment of wind and weather, but Porter found his hand forced on the 28th of March by a violent southerly gale which swept over the exposed bay of Valparaiso and dragged the Essex from her anchorage. One of her cables parted while the crew struggled to get sail on her. As she drifted seaward, Porter decided to seize the emergency and take the long chance of running out to windward of the Phoebe and the Cherub. He therefore cut the other cable, and the Essex plunged into the wind under single-reefed topsails to claw past the headland. Just as she was about to clear it, a whistling squall carried away the maintopmast. This accident was a grave disaster, for the disabled frigate was now unable either to regain a refuge in the bay or to win her way past the British ship.

As a last resort Captain Porter turned and ran along the coast, within pistol shot of it, far inside the three-mile limit of neutral water, and came to an anchor about three miles north of the city. Captain Hillyar had no legal right to molest him, but in his opinion the end justified the means and he resolved to attack. Deliberately the Phoebe and Cherub selected their stations and, late in this stormy afternoon, bombarded the crippled Essex without mercy. Porter with his carronades was unable to repay the damage inflicted by the broadsides of the longer guns, nor could he handle his ship to close in and retrieve the day in the desperate game of boarding. He tried this ultimate venture, nevertheless, and let go his cables. But the ship refused to move ahead. Her sheets, tacks, and halliards had been shot away. The canvas was hanging loose.

Porter's guns were by no means silent, however, even in this hopeless situation, and few crews have died harder or fought more grimly than these seamen of the Essex. Among them was a little midshipman, wounded but still at his post, a mere child of thirteen years whose name was David Farragut. His fortune it was to link those early days of the American navy with a period half a century later when he won his renown as the greatest of American admirals.

In many a New England seaport were told the tales of this last fight of the Essex until they became almost legendary—of Seaman John Ripley, who cried, after losing his leg, "Farewell, boys, I can be of no more use to you," and thereupon flung himself overboard out of a bow port; of James Anderson, who died encouraging his comrades to fight bravely in defense of liberty; of Benjamin Hazen, who dressed himself in a clean shirt and jerkin, told his messmates that he could never submit to being taken prisoner by the English and forthwith leaped into the sea and was drowned. Such incidents help us to descry, amid the smoke and slaughter of that desperate encounter, the spirit of the gallant David Porter. Never was the saying, "It's not the ships but the men in them," better exemplified. To Porter was granted greatness in defeat, a lot that comes to few.

For two hours he and his men endured such dreadful punishment as not many ships have suffered. Again he attempted to work his way nearer the enemy, until he had not enough men left unhurt to serve the guns or to haul at the pitifully splintered spars. In the last extremity, Porter made an effort to destroy his vessel and to save her people from captivity by letting the Essex drive ashore. A kedge anchor was let go, and a dozen sailors tramped around the capstan while the chantey man piped up a tune, but again fortune seemed against him for the hawser snapped, and the wind began to blow the frigate into deeper water. What happened then is best recalled in the simple words of Captain David Porter himself:

I now sent for the officers of division to consult them and what was my surprise to find only acting Lieutenant Stephen Decatur M'Knight remaining.... I was informed that the cockpit, the steerage, the wardroom, and the berth deck could contain no more wounded, that the wounded were killed while the surgeons were dressing them, and that if something was not speedily done to prevent it, the ship would soon sink from the number of shot holes in her bottom. On sending for the carpenter he informed me that all his crew had been killed or wounded.

The enemy, from the impossibility of reaching him with our carronades and the little apprehension that was excited by our fire, which had now become much slackened, was enabled to take aim at us as at a target; his shot never missed our hull and my ship was cut up in a manner which was perhaps never before witnessed; in fine, I saw no hope of saving her, and at twenty minutes after 6 P.M. I gave the painful order to strike the colors. Seventy-five men including officers were all that remained of my whole crew after the action, many of them severely wounded, some of whom have since died.

The enemy still continued his fire and my brave, though unfortunate companions were still falling about me. I directed an opposite gun to be fired to show them we intended no further resistance but they did not desist. Four men were killed at my side and others at different parts of the ship. I now believed he intended to show us no quarter, that it would be as well to die with my flag flying as struck, and was on the point of again hoisting it when about ten minutes after hauling down the colors he ceased firing.

... We have been unfortunate but not disgraced—the defense of the Essex has not been less honorable to her officers and crew than the capture of an equal force; and I now consider my situation less unpleasant than that of Captain Hillyar, who in violation of every principle of honor and generosity, and regardless of the rights of nations, attacked the Essex in her crippled state within pistol shot of a neutral shore, when for six weeks I had daily offered him fair and honorable combat on terms greatly to his advantage.

The behavior of Captain Hillyar after the surrender, however, was most humane and courteous, and lapse of time has dispelled somewhat of the bitterness of the American opinion of him. If he was not as chivalrous as his Yankee foemen had expected, it must be remembered that there was a heavy grudge and a long score to pay in the havoc wrought among British merchantmen and whalers and that in those days the rights of South American neutrals were rather lightly regarded.



CHAPTER IX

VICTORY ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN

Spectacular as were the exploits of the American navy on the sea, they were of far less immediate consequence in deciding the destinies of the war than were the naval battles fought on fresh water between hastily improvised squadrons. On Lake Erie Perry's victory had recovered a lost empire and had made the West secure against invasion. Macdonough's handful of little vessels on Lake Champlain compelled the retreat of ten thousand British veterans of Wellington's campaigns who had marched down from Canada with every promise of crushing American resistance. This was the last and most formidable attempt on the part of the enemy to conquer territory and to wrest a decision by means of a sustained offensive. Its collapse marked the beginning of the end, and such events as the capture of Washington and the battle of New Orleans were in the nature of episodes.

That September day of 1814, when Macdonough won his niche in the naval hall of fame, was also the climax and the conclusion of the long struggle of the American armies on the northern frontier, a confused record of defeat, vacillation, and crumbling forces, which was redeemed towards the end by troops who had learned how to fight and by new leaders who restored the honor of the flag at Chippawa and Lundy's Lane. Although the ambitious attempts against Canada, so often repeated, were so much wasted effort until the very end, they ceased to be inglorious. The tide turned in the summer of 1814 with the renewal of the struggle for the Niagara region where the British had won a foothold upon American soil.

In command of a vigorous and disciplined American army was General Jacob Brown, that stout-hearted volunteer who had proved his worth when the enemy landed at Sackett's Harbor. He was not a professional soldier but his troops had been trained and organized by Winfield Scott who was now a brigadier. After two years of dismal reverses, the United States was learning how to wage war. Incompetency was no longer the badge of high military rank. A general was supposed to know something about his trade and to have a will of his own.

With thirty-five hundred men, Jacob Brown made a resolute advance to find and join battle with the British forces of General Riall which garrisoned the forts of St. George's, Niagara, Erie, Queenston, and Chippawa. Early in the morning of July 3, 1814, the American troops in two divisions crossed the river and promptly captured Fort Erie. They then pushed ahead fifteen miles until they encountered the British defensive line on the Chippawa River where it flows into the Niagara.

The field was like a park, with open, grassy spaces and a belt of woodland which served as a green curtain to screen the movements of both armies. Riall boldly assumed the offensive, although he was aware that he had fewer men. His instructions intimated that liberties might be taken with the Americans which would seem hazardous "to a military man unacquainted with the character of the enemy he had to contend with, or with the events of the last two campaigns on that frontier." The deduction was unflattering but very much after the fact.

The British attack was unlooked for. It was the Fourth of July and in celebration Winfield Scott had given his men the best dinner that the commissary could supply and was marching them into a meadow in the cool of the summer afternoon for drill and review. The celebration, however, was interrupted by firing and confusion among the militia who happened to be in front, and Scott rushed his brigade forward to take the brunt of the heavy assault. General Jacob Brown rode by at a gallop, waving his hat and cheerily shouting, "You will have a battle." He was hurrying to bring up his other forces, but meanwhile Scott's column crossed a bridge at the double-quick and faced the enemy's batteries.

Exposed, taken by surprise, and outnumbered, Winfield Scott and his regiments were nevertheless equal to the occasion. A battalion was sent to cover one flank in the dense woodland, while the main body drove straight for the columns of British infantry and then charged with bayonets at sixty paces. The American ranks were steady and unbroken although they were pelted with musketry fire, and they smashed a British counter-charge by three regiments before it gained momentum. Handsomely fought and won, it was not a decisive battle and might be called no more than a skirmish but its significance was highly important, for at Chippawa there was displayed a new spirit in the American army.

Riall retreated with his red-coated regulars to a stronger line at Queenston, while Jacob Brown was sending anxious messages to Commodore Chauncey begging him to use his fleet in cooperation and so break the power of the enemy in Upper Canada. "For God's sake, let me see you," he implored. But again the American ships on Lake Ontario failed to seize an opportunity, and in this instance Chauncey's inactivity dismayed not only General Brown but also the Government at Washington. The fleet remained at Sackett's Harbor with excuses which appeared inadequate: certain changes were being made among the officers and crews, and again "the squadron had been prevented being earlier fitted for sea in consequence of the delay in obtaining blocks and iron-work." Chauncey subsequently fell ill, which may have had something to do with his lapse of energy. The whole career of this naval commander on Lake Ontario had disappointed expectations, even though the Secretary had commended his "zeal, talent, constancy, courage, and prudence of the highest order." The trouble was that Chauncey let slip one chance after another to win the control of Lake Ontario in pitched battle. Always too intent on building more ships instead of fighting with those he had, he is therefore not remembered in the glorious companionship of Perry and Macdonough.

This failure to act at the moment when Jacob Brown was so valiantly endeavoring to wrest from the British the precious Niagara peninsula was responsible for the desperate and inconclusive battle of Lundy's Lane. Winfield Scott frankly blamed the unsuccessful result upon the freedom with which the British troops and supplies were moved on Lake Ontario. For ten days Jacob Brown had remained in a painful state of suspense and perplexity, until finally the word came that nobody knew when the American fleet would sail. As he had feared, the British command, able to move its troops unmolested across the lake, planned to attack him in the rear and to cut his communications on the New York side of the Niagara River. For this purpose two enemy brigs were filled with troops and were sent over to Fort Niagara with more to follow.

It was to parry this threat that Brown moved his forces and brought about the clash at Lundy's Lane. "As it appeared," he explained, "that the enemy with his increased strength was about to avail himself of the hazard under which our baggage and stores were on our side of the Niagara, I conceived the most effectual method of recalling him from the object was to put myself in motion towards Queenston. General Scott with his brigade were accordingly put in march on the road leading thither."

The action was fought about a mile back from the torrent of the Niagara, below the Falls, where the by-road known as Lundy's Lane joined the main road running parallel with the river. Here Scott's column came suddenly upon a force of British redcoats led by General Drummond. Scott hesitated to attack, because the odds were against his one brigade, but, fearing the effect of a retreat on the divisions behind him, he sent word to Brown that he would hold his ground and try to turn the enemy's left toward the Niagara. It was late in the day and the sun had almost set. Gradually Scott forced the British wing back, and Brown threw in reinforcements until the engagement became general. The fight continued furious even after darkness fell and never have men employed in the business of killing each other shown courage more stubborn. Both sides were equally determined and they fought until exhaustion literally compelled a halt.

Later in the evening fresh troops were hurled in on both sides, and they were at it again with the same impetuosity. A small hill, over which ran Lundy's Lane, was the goal the Americans fought for. They finally stormed it, "in so determined a manner," reported the enemy, "that our artillery men were bayoneted in the act of loading and the muzzles of the enemy's guns were advanced within a few yards of ours." Back and forth flowed the tide of battle in bloody waves, until midnight. Then sullenly and in good order the Americans retired three miles to camp at Chippawa. Next day the enemy resumed the position and held it unattacked.

It is fair to call Lundy's Lane a drawn battle. The casualties were something more than eight hundred for each side, and the troops engaged were about twenty-five hundred Americans and a like number of British. Both the shattered columns soon retired behind strong defenses. General Drummond led the British troops into camp at Niagara Falls, and General Ripley, in temporary command of the American brigades, Scott and Brown having been wounded, occupied the unfinished works of Fort Erie, on the Canadian side, just where the waters of Lake Erie enter the Niagara River.

The British determined to bombard these walls and intrenchments with heavy guns and then carry them by infantry assault. But this plan failed disastrously. On the 15th of August the British charged in three columns the bastions and batteries only to be savagely repulsed at every point with a loss of nine hundred men killed, wounded, or prisoners, while the defenders had only eighty-five casualties. Then Drummond settled down to besiege the place and succeeded in making it so uncomfortable that Jacob Brown, now recovered from his wound, organized a sortie in force which was made on the 17th of September. In the action which followed, the British batteries were overwhelmed and the American militia displayed magnificent steadiness and valor. Jacob Brown proudly informed the Governor of New York that "the militia of New York have redeemed their character—they behaved gallantly. Of those called out by the last requisition, fifteen hundred have crossed the state border to our support. This reinforcement has been of immense importance to us; it doubled our effective strength, and their good conduct cannot but have the happiest effect upon our nation."

This bold stroke ended the Niagara campaign. The British fell back, and the American army was in no condition for pursuit. In ten weeks Jacob Brown had fought four engagements without defeat and, barring the battle of New Orleans, his brief campaign was the one operation of the land war upon which Americans could look back with any degree of satisfaction.

The scene now shifted to Lake Champlain. The main work was the building up of an army to resist the menacing preparations for a British invasion from Montreal. Among the new American generals who had gained promotion by merit instead of favor was George Izard, trained in the military schools of England and Prussia, and an aide to Alexander Hamilton during his command of the army of the United States. Izard had been sent to Plattsburg in May, 1814, on the very eve of the great British campaign, and found everything in a deplorable state of unreadiness and inefficiency. While he was manfully struggling with these difficulties, Secretary Armstrong directed him to send four thousand of his men to the assistance of Jacob Brown on the Niagara front. General Izard obediently and promptly set out, although the defense of Lake Champlain was thereby deprived of this large body of troops. The expedition was almost barren of results, however, and at a time when every trained soldier was needed to oppose the march of the British veterans, Izard was at Fort Erie, idle, waiting to build winter quarters and writing to the War Department: "I confess I am greatly embarrassed. At the head of the most efficient army the United States have possessed during this war, much must be expected of me; and yet I can discern no object which can be achieved at this point worthy of the risk which will attend its attempt."

Izard had already predicted that the withdrawal of his forces from Plattsburg would leave northeastern New York at the mercy of the British and he spoke the truth. No sooner had his divisions started westward than the British army, ten thousand strong, under General Prevost, crossed the frontier and marched rapidly toward the Saranac River and then straight on to Plattsburg. Possession of this trading town the British particularly desired because through it passed an enormous amount of illicit traffic with Canada. Both Izard and Prevost agreed in the statement that the British army was almost entirely fed on supplies drawn from New York and Vermont by way of Lake Champlain. "Two thirds of the army in Canada are supplied with beef by American contractors," wrote Prevost, and there were not enough highways to accommodate the herds of cattle which were driven across the border.

To protect this source of supply by conquering the region was the task assigned the splendid army of British regulars who had fought under Wellington. The conclusion of the Peninsular campaign had released them for service in America, and England was now able for the first time to throw her military strength against the feeble forces of the United States. It was announced as the intention of the British Government to take and hold the lakes, from Champlain to Erie, as territorial waters and a permanent barrier. To oppose the large and seasoned army which was to effect these projects, there was an American force of only fifteen hundred men, led by Brigadier General Alexander Macomb. All he could do was to try to hold the defensive works at Plattsburg and to send forward small skirmishing parties to annoy the British army which advanced in solid column, without taking the trouble to deploy.

On the 6th of September Sir George Prevost with his army reached Plattsburg and encamped just outside the town. From a ridge the British leader beheld the redoubts, strong field works, and blockhouses, and at anchor in the bay the little American fleet of Commodore Thomas Macdonough. To Prevost it looked like a costly business to attempt to carry these defenses by assault and he therefore decided to await the arrival of the British ships of Captain George Downie. A combined attack by land and sea, he believed, should find no difficulty in wiping out American resistance.

Such was the situation and the weighty responsibility which confronted Macdonough and his sailors. It was the most critical moment of the war. With a seaman's eye for defense Macdonough met it by stationing his vessels in a carefully chosen position and prepared with a seaman's foresight for every contingency. Plattsburg Bay is about two miles wide and two long and lies open to the southward, with a cape called Cumberland Head bounding it on the east. It was in this sheltered water that Macdonough awaited attack, his ships riding about a mile from the American shore batteries. These guns were to be captured by the British army and turned against him, according to the plans of General Prevost, who was urging Captain Downie to hasten with his fleet and undertake a joint action, for, as he said, "it is of the highest importance that the ships, vessels, and gunboats of your command should combine a cooperation with the division of the army under my command. I only wait for your arrival to proceed against General Macomb's last position on the south bank of the Saranac."

These demands became more and more insistent, although the largest British ship, the Confiance, had been launched only a few days before and the mechanics were still toiling night and day to fit her for action. She was a formidable frigate, of the size of the American Chesapeake, and was expected to be more than a match for Macdonough's entire fleet. Captain Downie certainly expected the support of the army, which he failed to receive, for he clearly stated his position before the naval battle. "When the batteries are stormed and taken possession of by the British land forces, which the commander of the land forces has promised to do at the moment the naval action commences, the enemy will be obliged to quit their position, whereby we shall obtain decided advantage over them during the confusion. I would otherwise prefer fighting them on the lake and would wait until our force is in an efficient state but I fear they would take shelter up the lake and would not meet me on equal terms."

Compelled to seek and offer battle in Plattsburg Bay, the British vessels rounded Cumberland Head on the morning of the 11th of September and hove to while Captain Downie went ahead in a boat to observe the American position. He perceived that Macdonough had anchored his fleet in line in this order: the brig Eagle, twenty guns, the flagship Saratoga, twenty-six guns, the schooner Ticonderoga, seven guns, and the sloop Preble, seven guns. There was also a considerable squadron of little gunboats, or galleys, propelled by oars and mounting one gun. Opposed to this force was the stately Confiance, with her three hundred men and thirty-seven guns, such a ship as might have dared to engage the Constitution on blue water, and the Chub, Linnet, and Finch, much like Macdonough's three smaller vessels, besides a flotilla of the tiny, impudent gunboats which were like so many hornets.

Macdonough was a youngster of twenty-eight years to whom was granted this opportunity denied the officers who had grown gray in the service. The navy, which was also very young, had set its own stamp upon him, and his advancement he had won by sheer ability. Self-reliant and indomitable, like Oliver Hazard Perry, he had wrestled with obstacles and was ready to meet the enemy in spite of them. His fame among naval men outshines Perry's, and he is rated as the greatest fighting sailor who flew the American flag until Farragut surpassed them all.

The battle of Plattsburg Bay was contested straight from the shoulder with little chance for such evolutions as seeking the weather gage or wearing ship. With one fleet at anchor, as Nelson demonstrated at the Nile, the proper business of the other was to drive ahead and try to break the line or turn an end of it. This Captain Downie proceeded to attempt in a brave and highly skillful manner, with the Confiance leading into the bay and proposing to smash the Eagle with her first broadsides. The wind failed, however, and the British frigate dropped anchor within close range of the Saratoga, which displayed Macdonough's pennant, and pounded this vessel so accurately that forty American seamen, or one-fifth of the crew, were struck down by the first blast of the British guns.

Meanwhile the Linnet had reached her assigned berth and fought the American Eagle so successfully that the latter was disabled and had to leave the line. To balance this the Chub was so badly damaged that she drifted helpless among the American ships and was compelled to haul down her colors. The Finch committed a blunder of seamanship and by failing to keep close enough to the wind, which soon died away, she finally went aground and took no part in the battle. The Preble was driven from her anchorage and ran ashore under the Plattsburg batteries, and the Ticonderoga played no heavier part than to beat off the little British galleys.

The decisive battle was therefore fought by four ships, the American Saratoga and Eagle, and the British Confiance and Linnet. It was then that Macdonough acquitted himself as a man who did not know when he was beaten. The Confiance, which must have towered like a ship of the line, had so cruelly mauled the Saratoga that she seemed doomed to be blown out of water. So many of his gunners were killed by the double-shotted broadsides that Macdonough jumped from the quarter-deck to take a hand himself and encourage the survivors. He was sighting a gun when a round shot cut the spanker boom, and a fragment of the heavy spar knocked him senseless.

Recovering his wits, however, he returned to his gun. But another shot tore off the head of the gun captain and flung it in Macdonough's face with such force that he was hurled across the deck. At length all but one of the guns along the side exposed to the Confiance had been smashed or dismounted, and this last gun broke its fastening bolts, leaped from its carriage with the heavy recoil, and plunged into the main hatch. Silenced, shot through and through, her decks strewn with dead, the Saratoga might then have struck her colors with honor. But Macdonough had not begun to fight. Prepared for such an emergency, he let go a stern anchor, cut his bow cable, and "winded" or turned his ship around so that her other side with its uninjured row of guns was presented to the Confiance. Captain Downie had by this time been killed, and the acting commander of the British flagship endeavored to execute the same maneuver, but the Confiance was too badly crippled to be swung about. While she floundered, the Saratoga reduced her to submission. One of the surviving officers stated that "the ship's company declared they would no longer stand to their quarters nor could the officers with their utmost exertions rally them." The ship was sinking, with more than a hundred ragged holes in her hull and fivescore men dead or hurt. Fifteen minutes later the plucky Linnet surrendered after a long and desperate duel with the Eagle. The British galleys escaped from the bay under sail and oar because no American ships were fit to chase them, but the Royal Navy had ceased to exist on Lake Champlain. For more than two hours the battle had been fought with a bulldog endurance not often equaled in the grim pages of naval history. And more nearly than any other incident of the War of 1812 it could be called decisive.

The American victory made the position of Prevost's army wholly untenable. With the control of Lake Champlain in Macdonough's hands, the British line of communication would be continually menaced. For the ten thousand veterans of Wellington's campaigns there was nothing to do but retreat, nor did they linger until they had marched across the Canada border. Though the way had lain open before them, they had not fought a battle, but were turned out of the United States, evicted, one might say, by a few small ships manned by several hundred American sailors. As Perry had regained the vast Northwest for his nation so, more momentously, did Macdonough avert from New York and New England a tide of invasion which could not otherwise have been stemmed.



CHAPTER X

PEACE WITH HONOR

The raids of the British navy on the American sea-coast through the last two years of the war were so many efforts to make effective the blockade which began with the proclamation of December, 1812, closing Chesapeake and Delaware bays. Successive orders in 1813 closed practically all the seaports from New London, Connecticut, to the Florida boundary, and the last sweeping proclamation of May, 1814, placed under strict blockade "all the ports, harbors, bays, creeks, rivers, inlets, outlets, islands, and seacoasts of the United States." It was the blockade of ports of the Middle States which caused such widespread ruin among merchants and shippers and which finally brought the Government itself to the verge of bankruptcy.

The first serious alarm was caused in the spring of 1813 by the appearance of a British fleet, under command of Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren and Rear-Admiral George Cockburn, in the Chesapeake and Delaware bays. Apparently it had not occurred to the people of the seaboard that the war might make life unpleasant for them, and they had undertaken no measures of defense. Unmolested, Cockburn cruised up Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Susquehanna in the spring of 1813 and established a pleasant camp on an island from which five hundred sailors and marines harried the country at their pleasure, looting and burning such prosperous little towns as Havre de Grace and Fredericktown. The men of Maryland and Virginia proceeded to hide their chattels and to move their families inland. Panic took hold of these proud and powerful commonwealths. Cockburn had no scruples about setting the torch to private houses, "to cause the proprietors who had deserted them and formed part of the militia which had fled to the woods to understand and feel what they were liable to bring upon themselves by building forts and acting toward us with so much useless rancor." Though Cockburn was an officer of the British navy, he was also an unmitigated ruffian in his behavior toward non-combatants, and his own countrymen could not regard his career with satisfaction.

Admiral Warren had more justification in attacking Norfolk, which had a navy yard and forts and was therefore frankly belligerent. Unluckily for him the most important battery was manned by a hundred sailors from the Constellation and fifty marines. Seven hundred British seamen tried to land in barges, but the battery shattered three of the boats with heavy loss of life. Somewhat ruffled, Admiral Warren decided to go elsewhere and made a foray upon the defenseless village of Hampton during which he permitted his men to indulge in wanton pillage and destruction. Part of his fleet then sailed up to the Potomac and created a most distressing hysteria in Washington. The movement was a feint, however, and after frightening Baltimore and Annapolis, the ships cruised and blockaded the bay for several months.

In September of the following year another British division harassed the coast of Maine, first capturing Eastport and then landing at Belfast, Bangor, and Castine, and extorting large ransoms in money and supplies. New England was wildly alarmed. In a few weeks all of Maine east of the Penobscot had been invaded, conquered, and formally annexed to New Brunswick, although two counties alone might easily have furnished twelve thousand fighting men to resist the small parties of British sailors who operated in leisurely security. The people of the coastwise towns gave up their sheep and bullocks to these rude trespassers, cut the corn and dug the potatoes for them, handed over all their powder and firearms, and agreed to finish and deliver schooners that were on the stocks.

Cape Cod was next to suffer, for two men-of-war levied contributions of thousands of dollars from Wellfleet, Brewster, and Eastham, and robbed and destroyed other towns. Farther south another fleet entered Long Island Sound, bombarded Stonington, and laid it in ruins. The pretext for all this havoc was a raid made by a few American troops who had crossed to Long Point on Lake Erie, May 15, 1814, and had burned some Canadian mills and a few dwellings. The expedition was promptly disowned by the American Government as unauthorized, but in retaliation the British navy was ordered to lay waste all towns on the Atlantic coast which were assailable, sparing only the lives of the unarmed citizens.

Included in the British plan of campaign for 1814 was a coastal attack important enough to divert American efforts from the Canadian frontier. This was why an army under General Ross was loaded into transports at Bermuda and escorted by a fleet to Chesapeake Bay. The raids against small coastwise ports, though lucrative, had no military value beyond shaking the morale of the population. The objective of this larger operation was undecided. Either Baltimore or Washington was tempting. But first the British had to dispose of the annoying gunboat flotilla of Commodore Joshua Barney, who had made his name mightily respected as a seaman of the Revolution and who had never been known to shake in his shoes at sight of a dozen British ensigns. He had found shelter for his armed scows, for they were no more than this, in the Patuxent River, but as he could not hope to defend them against a combined attack by British ships and troops he wisely blew them up. This turn of affairs left a fine British army all landed and with nothing else to do than promenade through a pleasant region with nobody to interfere. The generals and admirals discussed the matter and decided to saunter on to Washington instead of to Baltimore. In the heat of August the British regiments tramped along the highways, frequently halting to rest in the shade, until they were within ten miles of the capital of the nation. There they found the American outposts in a strong position on high ground, but these tarried not, and the invaders sauntered on another mile before making camp for the night. It is difficult to regard the capture of Washington with the seriousness which that lamentable episode deserves. The city was greatly surprised to learn that the enemy actually intended a discourtesy so gross, and the Government was pained beyond expression. But beyond this display of emotion nothing was done. The war was now two years old but no steps whatever had been taken to defend Washington, although there was no room for doubt that a British naval force could ascend the river whenever it pleased.

The disagreeable tidings that fifty of the enemy's ships had anchored off the Potomac, however, reminded the President and his advisers that not a single ditch or rampart had been even planned, that no troops were at hand, that it was rather late for advice which seemed to be the only ammunition that was plentiful. Quite harmoniously, the soldier in command was General Winder who could not lose his head, even in this dire emergency, because he had none to lose. His record for ineptitude on the fighting front had, no doubt, recommended him for this place. He ran about Washington, ordering the construction of defenses which there was no time to build, listening to a million frenzied suggestions, holding all manner of consultations, and imploring the Governors of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to send militia.

The British army was less than five thousand strong. To oppose them General Winder hastily scrambled together between five and six thousand men, mostly militia with a sprinkling of regulars and four hundred sailors from Barney's flotilla. During the night before the alleged battle the camp was a scene of such confusion as may be imagined while futile councils of war were held. The troops when reviewed by President Madison realized Jefferson's ideal of a citizen soldiery, unskilled but strong in their love of home, flying to arms to oppose an invader. General Jacob Brown and Winfield Scott at Lundy's Lane, which was fought within the same month, could have pointed out, in language quite emphatic, that a large difference existed between the raw material and the finished product.

On the 24th of August the British army advanced to Bladensburg, five miles from Washington, where a bridge spanned the eastern branch of the Potomac. Here the hilly banks offered the Americans an excellent line of defense. The Cabinet had gone to the Washington Navy Yard, by request of General Winder, to tell him what he ought to do, but this final conference was cut short by the news that the enemy was in motion. The American forces were still mobilizing in helter-skelter fashion, and there was a wild race to the scene of action by militiamen, volunteers, unattached regulars, sailors, generals, citizens at large, Cabinet members, and President Madison himself.

Some Maryland militia hastily joined the Baltimore troops on the ridge behind the village of Bladensburg, but part of General Winder's own forces were still on the march and had not yet been assigned positions when the advance column of British light infantry were seen to rush down the slope across the river and charge straight for the bridge. They bothered not to seek a ford or to turn a flank but made straight for the American center. It was here that Winder's artillery and his steadiest regiments were placed and they offered a stiff resistance, ripping up the British vanguard with grapeshot and mowing men down right and left. But these hardened British campaigners had seen many worse days than this on the bloody fields of Spain, and they pushed forward, closing the gaps in their ranks, until they had crossed the bridge and could find a brief respite under cover of the trees which lined the stream. Advancing again, they ingeniously discharged flights of rockets and with these novel missiles they not only disorganized the militia in front of them but also stampeded the battery mules. Most of the American army promptly followed the mules and endeavored to set a new record for a foot race from Bladensburg to Washington. The Cabinet members and other dignified spectators were swept along in the rout.

Commodore Joshua Barney and his four hundred weather-beaten bluejackets declined to join this speed contest. They were used to rolling decks and had no aptitude for sprinting, besides which they held the simple-minded notion that their duty was to fight. Up to this time they had been held back by orders and now arrived just as the American lines broke in wild confusion. With them were five guns which they dragged into position across the main highway and speedily unlimbered. The British were hastening to overtake the fleeing enemy when they encountered this awkward obstacle. Three times they charged Barney's battery and were three times repulsed by sailors and marines who fought them with muskets, cutlasses, and handspikes, and who served those five guns with an efficiency which would have pleased Isaac Hull or Bainbridge.

Unwilling to pay the price of direct attack, the British General Ross wisely ordered his infantry to surround Barney's stubborn contingent. The American troops who were presumed to support and protect this naval battery failed to hold their ground and melted into the mob which was swirling toward Washington. The sailors, though abandoned, continued to fight until the British were firing into them from the rear and from both flanks. Barney fell wounded and some of his gunners were bayoneted with lighted fuses in their hands. Snarling, undaunted, the sailors broke through the cordon and saved themselves, the last to leave a battlefield upon which not one American soldier was visible. They had used their ammunition to the end and they faced five thousand British veterans; wherefore they had done what the navy expected of them. On a day so shameful that no self-respecting American can read of it without blushing they had enacted the one redeeming episode. Commodore Barney described this action in a manner blunt and unadorned:

The engagement continued, the enemy advancing and our own army retreating before them, apparently in much disorder. At length the enemy made his appearance on the main road, in force, in front of my battery, and on seeing us made a halt. I reserved our fire. In a few minutes the enemy again advanced, when I ordered an eighteen-pounder to be fired, which completely cleared the road; shortly after, a second and a third attempt was made by the enemy to come forward but all were destroyed. They then crossed into an open field and attempted to flank our right. He was met there by three twelve-pounders, the marines under Captain Miller, and my men acting as infantry, and again was totally cut up. By this time not a vestige of the American army remained, except a body of five or six hundred posted on a height on my right, from which I expected much support from their fine situation.

Barney was made a prisoner, although his men stood by him until he ordered them to retreat. Loss of blood had made him too weak to be carried from the field. General Ross and Admiral Cockburn saw to it personally that he was well cared for and paid him the greatest respect and courtesy. As for the other British officers, they, too, were sportsmen who admired a brave man, even in the enemy's uniform, and Barney reported that they treated him "like a brother."

The American army had scampered to Washington with a total loss of ten killed and forty wounded among the five thousand men who had been assembled at Bladensburg to protect and save the capital. The British tried to pursue but the afternoon heat was blistering and the rapid pace set by the American forces proved so fatiguing to the invaders that many of them were bowled over by sunstroke. To permit their men to run themselves to death did not appear sensible to the British commanders, and they therefore sat down to gain their breath before the final promenade to Washington in the cool of the evening. They found a helpless, almost deserted city from which the Government had fled and the army had vanished.

The march had been orderly, with a proper regard for the peaceful inhabitants, but now Ross and Cockburn carried out their orders to plunder and burn. At the head of their troops they rode to the Capitol, fired a volley through the windows, and set fire to the building. Two hundred men then sought the President's mansion, ransacked the rooms, and left it in flames. Next day they burned the official buildings and several dwellings and, content with the mischief thus wrought, abandoned the forlorn city and returned to camp at Bladensburg. But more vexation for the Americans was to follow, for a British fleet was working its way up the Potomac to anchor off Alexandria. Here there was the same frightened submission, with the people asking for terms and yielding up a hundred thousand dollars' worth of flour, tobacco, naval stores, and shipping.

The British squadron then returned to Chesapeake Bay and joined the main fleet which was preparing to attack Baltimore. The army of General Ross was recalled to the transports and was set ashore at the mouth of the Patapsco River while the ships sailed up to bombard Fort McHenry, where the star-spangled banner waved. To defend Baltimore by land there had been assembled more than thirteen thousand troops under command of General Samuel Smith. The tragical farce of Bladensburg, however, had taught him no lesson, and to oppose the five thousand toughened regulars of General Ross he sent out only three thousand green militia most of whom had never been under fire. They put up a wonderfully good fight and deserved praise for it, but wretched leadership left them drawn up in an open field, with both flanks unprotected, and they were soon driven back. Next morning—the 13th of September—the British advanced but found the roads so blocked by fallen trees and entanglements that progress was slow and laborious. The intrenchments which crowned the hills of Baltimore appeared so formidable that the British decided to await action by the fleet and attempt a night assault.

General Ross was killed during the advance, and this loss caused confusion of council. The heavy ships were unable to lie within effective range of the forts because of shoal water and a barrier of sunken hulks, and Fort McHenry was almost undamaged by the bombardment of the lighter craft. All through the night a determined fire was returned by the American garrison of a thousand men, and, although the British fleet suffered little, Vice-Admiral Cochrane concluded that a sea attack was a hopeless enterprise. He so notified the army, which thereupon retreated to the transports, and the fleet sailed down Chesapeake Bay, leaving Baltimore free and unscathed.

Among those who watched Fort McHenry by the glare of artillery fire through this anxious night was a young lawyer from Washington, Francis Scott Key, who had been detained by the British fleet down the bay while endeavoring to effect an exchange of prisoners. He had a turn for verse-making. Most of his poems were mediocre, but the sight of the Stars and Stripes still fluttering in the early morning breeze inspired him to write certain deathless stanzas which, when fitted to the old tune of Anacreon in Heaven, his country accepted as its national anthem. In this exalted moment it was vouchsafed him to sound a trumpet call, clear and far-echoing, as did Rouget de Lisle when, with soul aflame, he wrote the Marseillaise for France. If it was the destiny of the War of 1812 to weld the nation as a union, the spirit of the consummation was expressed for all time in the lines which a hundred million of free people sing today:

O! say can you see by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?

The luckless endeavor to capture Baltimore by sea and land was the last British expedition that alarmed the Atlantic coast. The hostile army and naval forces withdrew to Jamaica, from which base were planned and undertaken the Louisiana campaign and the battle of New Orleans.

* * * * *

The brilliant leadership and operations of Andrew Jackson were so detached and remote from all other activities that he may be said to have fought a private war of his own. It had seemed clear to Madison that, as a military precaution, the control of West Florida should be wrenched from Spain, whose neutrality was dubious and whose Gulf territory was the rendezvous of privateers, pirates, and other lawless gentry, besides offering convenient opportunity for British invasion by sea. As early as the autumn of 1812 troops were collected to seize and hold this region for the duration of the war. The people of the Mississippi Valley welcomed the adventure with enthusiasm. It was to be aimed against a European power presumably friendly, but the sheer love of conquest and old grudges to settle were motives which brushed argument aside. Andrew Jackson was the major general of the Tennessee militia, and so many hardy volunteers flocked to follow him that he had to sift them out, mustering in at Nashville two thousand of whom he said: "They are the choicest of our citizens. They go at our call to do the will of Government. No constitutional scruples trouble them. Nay, they will rejoice at the opportunity of placing the American eagle on the ramparts of Pensacola, Mobile, and Fort St. Augustine."

Where the fiery Andrew Jackson led, there was neither delay nor hesitation. At once he sent his backwoods infantry down river in boats, while the mounted men rode overland. Four weeks later the information overtook him at Natchez that Congress had refused to sanction the expedition. When the Secretary of War curtly told him that his corps was "dismissed from public service," Andrew Jackson in a furious temper ignored the order and marched his men back to Nashville instead of disbanding them. He was not long idle, however, for the powerful confederacy of the Creek Indians had been aroused by a visit of the great Tecumseh, and the drums of the war dance were sounding in sympathy with the tribes of the Canadian frontier. In Georgia and Alabama the painted prophets and medicine men were spreading tales of Indian victories over the white men at the river Raisin and Detroit. British officials, moreover, got wind of a threatened uprising in the South and secretly encouraged it.

The Alabama settlers took alarm and left their log houses and clearings to seek shelter in the nearest blockhouses and stockades. One of these belonged to Samuel Mims, a half-breed farmer, who had prudently fortified his farm on a bend of the Alabama River. A square stockade enclosed an acre of ground around his house and to this refuge hastened several hundred pioneers and their families, with their negro slaves, and a few officers and soldiers. Here they were surprised and massacred by a thousand naked Indians who called themselves Red Sticks because of the wands carried by their fanatical prophets. Two hundred and fifty scalps were carried away on poles, and when troops arrived they found nothing but heaps of ashes, mutilated bodies, and buzzards feeding on the carrion.

From Fort Mims the Indians overran the country like a frightful scourge, murdering and burning, until a vast region was emptied of its people. First to respond to the pitiful calls for help was Tennessee, and within a few weeks twenty-five hundred infantry and a thousand cavalry were marching into Alabama, led by Andrew Jackson, who had not yet recovered from a wound received in a brawl with Thomas H. Benton. Among Jackson's soldiers were two young men after his own heart, David Crockett and Samuel Houston. The villages of the fighting Creeks, at the Hickory Ground, lay beyond a hundred and sixty miles of wilderness, but Jackson would not wait for supplies. He plunged ahead, living somehow on the country, until his men, beginning to break under the strain of starvation and other hardships, declared open mutiny. But Jackson cursed, threatened, argued them into obedience again and again. When such persuasions failed, he planted cannon to sweep their lines and told them they would have to pass over his dead body if they refused to go on.

The failure of other bodies of troops to support his movements and a discouraged Governor of Tennessee could not daunt his purpose. He was told that the campaign had failed and that the struggle was useless. To this he replied that he would perish first and that energy and decision, together with the fresh troops promised him, would solve the crisis. Months passed, and the militia whose enlistments had expired went home, while the other broke out in renewed and more serious mutinies. The few regulars sent to Jackson he used as police to keep the militia in order. The court-martialing and shooting of a private had a beneficial effect.

With this disgruntled, unreliable, weary force, Jackson came, at length, to a great war camp of the Creek Indians at a loop of the Tallapoosa River called Horseshoe Bend. Here some ten hundred picked warriors had built defensive works which were worthy of the talent of a trained engineer. They also had as effective firearms as the white troops who assaulted the stronghold. Andrew Jackson bombarded them with two light guns, sent his men over the breastworks, and captured the breastworks in hand-to-hand fighting in which quarter was neither asked nor given. No more than a hundred Indians escaped alive, and dead among the logs and brushwood were the three famous prophets, gorgeous in war paint and feathers, who had preached the doctrine of exterminating the paleface.

The name of Andrew Jackson spread far and wide among the hostile Indian tribes, and the fiercest chiefs dreaded it like a tempest. Some made submission, and others joined in signing a treaty of peace which Jackson dictated to them with terms as harsh as the temper of the man who had conquered them.

For his distinguished services Jackson was made a major general of the regular army. He was then ordered to Mobile, where his impetuous anger was aroused by the news that the British had landed at Pensacola and had pulled down the Spanish flag. The splendor of this ancient seaport had passed away, and with it the fleets of galleons whose sailors heard the mission bells and saw the brass guns gleam from the stout fortresses which in those earlier days guarded the rich commerce of the overland trade route to St. Augustine.

Aforetime one of the storied and romantic ports of the Spanish Main, Pensacola now slumbered in unlovely decay and was no more than a village to which resorted the smugglers of the Caribbean, the pirates of the Gulf, and rascally men of all races and colors. The Spanish Governor still lived in the palace with a few slovenly troops, but he could no more than protest when a hundred royal marines came ashore from two British sloops-of-war, and the commander, Major Nicholls, issued a thunderous proclamation to the oppressed people of the American States adjoining, letting them know that he was ready to assist them in liberating their paternal soil from a faithless, imbecile Government. They were not to be alarmed at his approach. They were to range themselves under the standard of their forefathers or be neutral.

Having fired this verbal blunderbuss, Major Nicholls sent a sloop-of-war to enlist the support of Jean and Pierre Lafitte, enterprising brothers who maintained on Barataria Bay in the Gulf, some forty miles south of New Orleans, a most lucrative resort for pirates and slave traders. There they defied the law and the devil, trafficking in spoils filched from honest merchantmen whose crews had walked the plank. Pierre Lafitte was a very proper figure of a pirate himself, true to the best traditions of his calling. But withal he displayed certain gallantry to atone for his villainies, for he spurned British gold and persuasions and offered his sword and his men to defend New Orleans as one faithful to the American cause.

If it was the purpose of Nicholls to divert Jackson's attention from New Orleans which was to be the objective of the British expedition preparing at Jamaica, he succeeded admirably; but in deciding to attack Jackson's forces at Mobile, he committed a grievous error. The worthy Nicholls failed to realize that he had caught a Tartar in General Jackson—"Old Hickory," the sinewy backwoodsman who would sooner fight than eat and who was feared more than the enemy by his own men. As might have been expected, the garrison of one hundred and sixty soldiers who held Fort Bowyer, which dominated the harbor of Mobile, solemnly swore among themselves that they would never surrender until the ramparts were demolished over their heads and no more than a corporal's guard survived. This was Andrew Jackson's way.

Four British ships, with a total strength of seventy-eight guns, sailed into Mobile Bay on the 15th of September and formed in line of battle, easily confident of smashing Fort Bowyer with its twenty guns, while the landing force of marines and Indians took position behind the sand dunes and awaited the signal. The affair lasted no more than an hour. The American gunnery overwhelmed the British squadron. The Hermes sloop-of-war was forced to cut her cable and drifted under a raking fire until she ran aground and was blown up. The Sophie withdrew after losing many of her seamen, and the two other ships followed her to sea after delaying to pick up the marines and Indians who merely looked on. Daybreak saw the squadron spreading topsails to return to Pensacola.

Andrew Jackson was eager to return the compliment but, not having troops enough at hand to march on Pensacola, he had to wait and fret until his force was increased to four thousand men. Then he hurled them at the objective with an energy that was fairly astounding. On the 3d of November he left Mobile and three days later was demanding the surrender of Pensacola. The next morning he carried the town by storm, waited another day until the British had evacuated and blown up Fort Barrancas, six miles below the city, and then returned to Mobile. Sickness laid him low but, enfeebled as he was, he made the journey to New Orleans by easy stages and took command of such American troops as he could hastily assemble to ward off the mightiest assault launched by Great Britain during the War of 1812. It was known, and the warning had been repeated from Washington, that the enemy intended sending a formidable expedition against Louisiana, but when Jackson arrived early in December the Legislature had voted no money, raised no regiments, devised no plan of defense, and was unprepared to make any resistance whatever.

A British fleet of about fifty sail, carrying perhaps a thousand guns, had gathered for the task in hand. The decks were crowded with trained and toughened troops, the divisions which had scattered the Americans at Bladensburg with a volley and a shout, kilted Highlanders, famous regiments which had earned the praise of the Iron Duke in the Spanish Peninsula, and brawny negro detachments recruited in the West Indies. It was such an army as would have been considered fit to withstand the finest troops in Europe. In command was one of England's most brilliant soldiers, General Sir Edward Pakenham, of whom Wellington had said, "my partiality for him does not lead me astray when I tell you that he is one of the best we have." He was the idol of his officers, who agreed that they had never served under a man whose good opinion they were so desirous of having, "and to fall in his estimation would have been worse than death." In brief, he was a high-minded and knightly leader who had seen twenty years of active service in the most important campaigns of Europe.

It was Pakenham's misfortune to be unacquainted with the highly irregular and unconventional methods of warfare as practiced in America, where troops preferred to take shelter instead of being shot down while parading across open ground in solid columns. Improvised breastworks were to him a novelty, and the lesson of Bunker Hill had been forgotten. These splendidly organized and seasoned battalions of his were confident of walking through the Americans at New Orleans as they had done at Washington, or as Pakenham himself had smashed the finest French infantry at Salamanca when Wellington told him, "Ned, d'ye see those fellows on the hill? Throw your division into column; at them, and drive them to the devil."