Now coil up your nonsense ’bout England’s great Navy,
And take in your slack about oak-hearted Tars,
For frigates as stout, and as gallant crews have we,
Or how came her Macedon decked with our Stars?
Yes—how came her Guerrière, her Peacock and Java,
All sent broken-ribb’d to Old Davy of late?
How came it? Why, split me! than Britons we’re braver,
And that they shall feel too whenever we meet.
So sang the Yankee ballad-maker when filled with the haughty spirit that precedes a fall. Surely, if ever a young nation had reason for exultation and even for vainglorious songs young America had. During eight months her tiny navy had not only maintained itself upon the high seas where the enemy out-numbered it a hundred to one, but, as said, it had won more victories in that time than all Europe had been able to do in twenty years. Not only had the Americans showed the sturdy and persistent courage of the ancestral stock; they had shown the ingenuity of invention, the power of adaptation under unusual circumstances, and the general progressiveness which the spirit of that stock always develops when freed from Tory—that is to say, unreasonably conservative—restraints. To the natural aptness for the sea which they had in common with their cousins over the water, they had added such characteristics as naturally grow out of self-government.
Unfortunately, however, along with much good from the ancestral stock, they had also inherited not a little of the tendency to arrogant self-esteem. As the unbroken series of victories over European navies had made the British sailors feel themselves invincible, so the practically unbroken, if short, series of victories of the Americans over the British tars in the early months of the War of 1812, brought them to a state of mind where they trusted in something else than the unwearied vigilance and training that had made the crews of Hull, Decatur, Bainbridge, Jones, and Lawrence, the wonder—literally the wonder—of the whole world. Thereafter, defeat impended whenever an American ship might fall in with a British ship whose commander had not fallen into the prevailing slovenly habits of his navy.