The American Navy

by French Ensor Chadwick

But the history of the War of 1812 cannot close without mention of the crowning victory on land, New Orleans, on January 8, 1815. In this, perhaps the severest and completest repulse ever suffered by a British army, the navy bore a most important part, for by its efforts was prevented the flanking of General Jackson’s force from the river. The naval vessels, the Louisiana, with Commodore Patterson, and the Caroline, Lieutenant J. D. Henley, controlled the river situation on the British left flank until the latter was burned by hot shot from the British trenches. The Louisiana then shifted to cover Jackson’s right. The situation forced the British to transport siege pieces from the fleet, seventy miles away; this gave time for Jackson to strengthen his position and time for reinforcements to join him. The Louisiana’s guns were now landed and a battery established which would flank the newly established British battery as well as their attacking columns; the result was the destruction of the British battery soon after it had opened fire. The British move, on the day of the main attack, to capture the Louisiana’s battery on the right bank of the river, was finally successful through the flight of the supporting militia, but it was too late; the naval battery had already assisted in the bloody repulse of the main body, and there was nothing left to the capturing party but withdrawal.[43]

The war was now ended. It had been a second War of Independence, which had released America from the strong British influence which had still obtained and had established a real national spirit. The world recognized the birth of a new power upon the ocean, which the future was to reckon with, though America herself was slow to accept her new situation. We had, however, afloat in 1815, three line-of-battle ships, the Washington, Independence, and Franklin, and in this year we were to end, as has already been mentioned, our Barbary troubles forever by the action of Decatur in command of the largest fleet we were to have at sea for many years. We began a new life with a self-respect which had needed a war for its revival.

There was one note at least of dissatisfaction over the peace. The London Times, commenting in its issue of December 30, 1814, said: “We have retired from the combat with the stripes yet bleeding on our backs. Even yet, however, if we could but close the war with some great naval triumph, the reputation of our maritime greatness might be partially restored. But to say that it has not hitherto suffered in the estimation of all Europe, and, what is worse, of America herself, is to belie common sense and universal experience. ‘Two or three of our ships have struck to a force vastly inferior!’ No; not two or three, but many on the ocean and whole squadrons on the lakes; and the numbers are to be viewed with relation to the comparative magnitude of the two navies. Scarcely is there an American ship-of-war which has not to boast a victory over the British flag; scarcely one British ship in thirty or forty that has beaten an American. With the bravest seamen and the most powerful navy in the world, we retire from the contest when the balance of defeat is so heavily against us.”[44] And more defeats were yet to come. Perhaps yet more would have come, for just as the war closed, the first war-steamer to be built for over ten years, the Fulton, was ready for sea. With a double hull of such thickness as to be impervious to harm from any but the heaviest guns, moved by a wheel in the middle which was protected from shot, it seems almost a pity that she should not have been tried with her two 100-pound guns upon the ships blockading New York. But even as it was America had good reason to be well satisfied with the work of her navy.

CHAPTER XX

Though thirty-one years was to pass before the United States was again to be at war with a foreign power, and then with Mexico—which had no navy—they were far from being years of idleness or want of deeds accomplished.

Our flag was now shown in every sea and with the weight and authority which success always carries. Thus N. P. Willis, who in the early thirties was the guest of wardroom officers of the flagship in the Mediterranean, says in his “Pencilings by the Way”:

“From the comparisons I have made between our own ships and the ships-of-war of other nations, I think we may well be proud of our navy. I had learned in Europe long before joining the United States that the respect we exact from foreigners is paid more to America afloat than to a continent they think as far off at least as the moon. They see our men-of-war and they know very well what they have done and, from the appearance and character of our officers, what they might do again—and there is a tangibility in the deductions from knowledge and eyesight which beats books and statistics. I have heard Englishmen deny one by one every claim we have to political and moral superiority, but I have found none illiberal enough to refuse a compliment—and a handsome one—to Yankee ships.”[45]

The world was yet a world of piracy, and the extirpation of these wolves of the sea was a work which, when finished in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies, was to continue in the Far East to our own day. The situation, however, in the Caribbean Sea and its adjacent waters was particularly serious from the anarchic conditions arising through the revolt of Spain’s American dominions, with the exception of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, and this last was to join in the upheaval in 1821. But all became nests of piracy. The fault in the beginning was with our own Government, which had allowed too freely the fitting out of vessels, usually schooners, in our ports which sailed away for Venezuela or Argentina and there took out letters of marque and flew the insurgent flags. They captured not only Spanish vessels, but whatever seemed likely prize, and our own ships suffered as well as others. Galveston and Matagorda had also for years after the peace of 1815 been bases of piracy under the claim of patriotism. Our war with England had in fact so developed the greed in privateering that the more adventurous kept it up in the new form. Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico at the time thus bred pirates much as ill-conditioned ponds breed mosquitoes. When Mexico declared independence in 1821 and there was nothing left to Spain but Cuba and Puerto Rico, numerous privateers were fitted out from there against the privateers of the patriots, and the former became in turn as bad as the latter. Havana itself was one of the strongholds of these villains, the captain-general sharing in the profits, and each of the many curiously formed, deep, bottlelike harbors of Cuba was a pirate refuge. For nine years, from 1817 to 1826, the navy was busily engaged in suppressing these marauders, and it was on such duty, in 1819, that Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, in command of a squadron in the Caribbean, lost his life through yellow fever caught in the Orinoco. He was but thirty-four years old.

But while this work had its losses, it had also great uses, besides protecting the commercial world, in serving as a school for the greatest admiral of his or any time in fact, and for another great officer who was bound to him by peculiarly romantic ties. These were Farragut and Porter, who forty or more years later were to come to such distinguished fame. The story needs a telling.

The first Porter, a merchant captain, born in Massachusetts in 1727, had two sons, of whom David was the later admiral’s grandfather. This grandfather served as a privateersman, was a captain in the Massachusetts state navy in the Revolution, was captured and confined in the Jersey prison ship, escaped, and served at sea for the rest of the war. Becoming again a merchant captain, his bold and successful resistance to the impressment of his men by a British man-of-war in Santo Domingo led, when the navy came to life in 1794, to his appointment as a sailing master. He was in command of the naval station at New Orleans when in 1808, having had a sunstroke while fishing on Lake Ponchartrian, he was found and cared for by George Farragut, a sailing master in the navy who lived on the borders of the lake. Porter died, and Mrs. Farragut dying of yellow fever, both were buried on the same day, June 22, 1808.