When the press spoke at all of naval matters, it talked wildly about the American frigates. “Such fearful odds,” said the “Morning Post” in regard to the “Macedonian,” December 26, “would break the heart and spirit of our sailors, and dissolve that charm, that spell, which has made our navy invincible.” “The land-spell of the French is broken, and so is our sea-spell,” said the “Times.” The American frigates were exaggerated into ships-of-the-line, and were to be treated as such, British frigates keeping out of their way. At first, the British naval officers hesitated to accept this view of a subject which had never before been suggested. Neither Captain Dacres nor his court-martial attributed his defeat to this cause; but before long, nearly all England agreed to rate the American frigates as seventy-fours, and complained that the Americans, with their accustomed duplicity, should have deceived the British navy by representing the “Constitution” and “United States” to be frigates. The “Times” protested in vain against this weakness:—
“Good God! that a few short months should have so altered the tone of British sentiments! Is it true, or is it not, that our navy was accustomed to hold the Americans in utter contempt? Is it true, or is it not, that the ‘Guerriere’ sailed up and down the American coast with her name painted in large characters on her sails, in boyish defiance of Commodore Rodgers? Would any captain, however young, have indulged such a foolish piece of vain-boasting if he had not been carried forward by the almost unanimous feeling of his associates?”[10]
To the charge that the British Admiralty had been taken unprepared by the war, the Admiralty replied that its naval force on the American station at the outbreak of hostilities exceeded the American in the proportion of eighty-five to fourteen.
“We have since sent out more line-of-battle ships and heavier frigates,” added the “Times,” January 4, 1813. “Surely we must now mean to smother the American navy.... A very short time before the capture of the ‘Guerriere’ an American frigate was an object of ridicule to our honest tars. Now the prejudice is actually setting the other way, and great pains seem to be taken by the friends of ministers to prepare the public for the surrender of a British seventy-four to an opponent lately so much contemned.”
The loss of two or three thirty-eight gun frigates on the ocean was a matter of trifling consequence to the British government, which had a force of four ships-of-the-line and six or eight frigates in Chesapeake Bay alone, and which built every year dozens of ships-of-the-line and frigates to replace those lost or worn out; but although the American privateers wrought more injury to British interests than was caused or could be caused by the American navy, the pride of England cared little about mercantile losses, and cared immensely for its fighting reputation. The theory that the American was a degenerate Englishman,—a theory chiefly due to American teachings,—lay at the bottom of British politics. Even the late British minister at Washington, Foster, a man of average intelligence, thought it manifest good taste and good sense to say of the Americans in his speech of February 18, 1813, in Parliament, that “generally speaking, they were not a people we should be proud to acknowledge as our relations.”[11] Decatur and Hull were engaged in a social rather than in a political contest, and were aware that the serious work on their hands had little to do with England’s power, but much to do with her manners. The mortification of England at the capture of her frigates was the measure of her previous arrogance.
The process of acquiring knowledge in such light as was furnished by the cannon of Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge could not be rendered easy or rapid. News of the American victories dropped in at intervals, as though American captains intentionally prolonged the enjoyment of their certain success, in order to keep England in constant ill temper. News of the “Java” arrived about the middle of March, and once more the press broke into a chorus of complaints. The “Times” renewed its outcry; the “Courier” abused the “Times” for its “tone of whining lamentation, of affected sensibility, and puerile grief,” but admitted that the behavior of the American frigates seemed extraordinary; while the “Pilot,” the chief naval authority, lamented in set periods the incomprehensible event:—
“The public will learn, with sentiments which we shall not presume to anticipate, that a third British frigate has struck to an American. This is an occurrence that calls for serious reflection,—this, and the fact stated in our paper of yesterday, that Loyd’s list contains notices of upwards of five hundred British vessels captured in seven months by the Americans. Five hundred merchantmen and three frigates! Can these statements be true; and can the English people hear them unmoved? Any one who had predicted such a result of an American war this time last year would have been treated as a madman or a traitor. He would have been told, if his opponents had condescended to argue with him, that long ere seven months had elapsed the American flag would be swept from the seas, the contemptible navy of the United States annihilated, and their maritime arsenals rendered a heap of ruins. Yet down to this moment not a single American frigate has struck her flag. They insult and laugh at our want of enterprise and vigor. They leave their ports when they please, and return to them when it suits their convenience; they traverse the Atlantic; they beset the West India Islands; they advance to the very chops of the Channel; they parade along the coasts of South America; nothing chases, nothing intercepts, nothing engages them but to yield them triumph.”
The immediate moral drawn from these complaints was the necessity of punishing the United States; but no one could longer deny that the necessary punishment was likely to prove tedious and costly. February 18 Parliament took up the subject of the American war, and both Houses debated it. In the Lords, Bathurst made a temperate speech devoted to showing that America in claiming immunity from impressments claimed more than England could afford to yield,—“a right hitherto exercised without dispute, and of the most essential importance to our maritime superiority.” Lord Lansdowne replied with tact and judgment, rather hinting than saying that the right was becoming too costly for assertion. “Some time ago it was imagined on all hands that in the event of a war with America, the first operation would be the destruction of her navy. What the fact had turned out to be, he was almost ashamed to mention. If any one were asked what had been the success of our navy in this war, he would unfortunately find some difficulty in giving an answer.”[12] Lord Liverpool, while defending his administration from the charge of imbecility, tended to strengthen the prevailing impression by the tone of his complaints against America: “Although she might have had wrongs, although she might have had grounds for complaint, although she might have had pressing provocations, yet she ought to have looked to this country as the guardian power to which she was indebted not only for her comforts, not only for her rank in the scale of civilization, but for her very existence.”[13] Perhaps these words offered as good an explanation as the Prime Minister could give of the war itself, for apart from the unconscious sarcasm they contained, they implied that England assumed to act as guardian to the United States, and had hitherto denied to the United States the right to act independently.
Both Lord Holland and Lord Erskine gently glanced at this assumption; and Erskine went so far as to intimate that sooner or later England must give way. “It has been said that this war, if the Americans persist in their claims, must be eternal. If so, our prospects are disheartening. America is a growing country,—increasing every day in numbers, in strength, in resources of every kind. In a lengthened contest all the advantages are on her side, and against this country.” The warning lost none of its point from Lord Eldon, who, always ready to meet any logical necessity by an equally logical absurdity, granted that “unless America should think proper to alter her tone, he did not see how the national differences could be settled.”
Such a debate was little likely to discourage America. Every country must begin war by asserting that it will never give way, and of all countries England, which had waged innumerable wars, knew best when perseverance cost more than concession. Even at that early moment Parliament was evidently perplexed, and would willingly have yielded had it seen means of escape from its naval fetich, impressment. Perhaps the perplexity was more evident in the Commons than in the Lords, for Castlereagh, while defending his own course with elaborate care, visibly stumbled over the right of impressment. Even while claiming that its abandonment would have been “vitally dangerous if not fatal” to England’s security, he added that he “would be the last man in the world to underrate the inconvenience which the Americans sustained in consequence of our assertion of the right of search.” The embarrassment became still plainer when he narrowed the question to one of statistics, and showed that the whole contest was waged over the forcible retention of some eight hundred seamen among one hundred and forty-five thousand employed in British service. Granting the number were twice as great, he continued, “could the House believe that there was any man so infatuated, or that the British empire was driven to such straits, that for such a paltry consideration as seventeen hundred sailors, his Majesty’s government would needlessly irritate the pride of a neutral nation or violate that justice which was due to one country from another?” If Liverpool’s argument explained the causes of war, Castlereagh’s explained its inevitable result, for since the war must cost England at least ten million pounds a year, could Parliament be so infatuated as to pay ten thousand pounds a year for each American sailor detained in service, when one tenth of the amount, if employed in raising the wages of the British sailor, would bring any required number of seamen back to their ships? The whole British navy in 1812 cost twenty million pounds; the pay-roll amounted to only three million pounds; the common sailor was paid four pounds bounty and eighteen pounds a year, which might have been trebled at half the cost of an American war.