From a lithograph at the Navy Department, Washington.
It was no small honor to have one’s name mentioned in connection with Hull, Decatur, and Jones, but a few months later (July 13, 1813) Elliott’s name once more appears in an act of Congress, this time in connection with that of Lawrence. Lawrence and his men get $25,000 for the destruction of the Peacock; Elliott “and his officers and companions” get $12,000 for the destruction of the Detroit.
The fight in which Lieutenant Jesse D. Elliott won these honors, if compared gun for gun and man for man with the battles of the great naval heroes with whom his name was mentioned, was but small and unimportant. They fought with well-manned, fully equipped ships on the high seas; he in row-boats on a fresh-water lake in the backwoods, and armed with borrowed weapons. But when considered in its proper light—when considered in its influence upon the Americans and on the enemy, and especially when considered in its influence as the forerunner of the great fresh-water battles where Perry and Macdonough won glory, this was a most important conflict; for it fired the hearts of the Yankee frontiersmen at a time when such disasters as the surrender of Detroit to the British had made some kind of encouragement most needful.
But before recounting the stirring events of the night when this Yankee seaman earned his first honors, it is important to recount, as briefly as may be, how it happened that Elliott, a salt-sea sailor, was found on a fresh-water sea in the backwoods.
It is a delight to the student who loves nature to think of the American frontier as it was in the days of 1812. For in those days the forest stretched away from Maine along the swift St. Lawrence and the green waters of the Great Lakes to end at the prairies of the far West. It was a country as God made it and almost unmarred by the bungling hand of man. The moose and the red deer, the wild turkey and the partridge, roamed undisturbed at will, and the settlers who had gathered at widely separated points must needs provide bounties on wolf and panther and wild-cat scalps to protect their cattle and sheep, their ducks and chickens. To go to the St. Lawrence River the traveller found it most convenient to go up the Hudson to the head of navigation, and then, after carrying his burden overland to Lake George, proceed by the way of Lake Champlain. To the east of this there was no highway through the vast forest. To the west lay the Adirondacks. To reach the Great Lakes the traveller must needs leave the Hudson for the Mohawk, and travel up its winding course in the shoal-draft scows called batteaux that were pushed along by poles, just as the Big Sandy and Tug Rivers in the Kentucky mountains are navigated at this day. At Little Falls was a portage where the Indians and the Dutch used to compete for the privilege of carrying goods around the broken water, and thereafter the route as far as where Rome now stands was usually unimpeded. This place reached, another portage must be made to Wood Creek, that flowed toward Lake Ontario, and so at last the traveller saw from the bluffs of Oswego the wide water before him. There were, indeed, roads along these routes—trails, properly speaking, over which one could drive a wagon in the dry months of summer and early fall, and a sled after the snow came in winter. In the wet seasons these trails were practically impassable.
Nevertheless, when the Congress discussed schemes for resenting British aggression, the invasion of Canada was always mentioned first of all!
Sackett’s Harbor, 1814.
To operate against Canada effectually it was necessary to have a naval force on the great fresh-water lakes of Erie and Ontario. When the British ship Leopard attacked the Chesapeake in order to impress upon American minds that once an American citizen was impressed into the British Navy he must remain there until the British Government saw fit to release him, the American Congress was stirred so far as to order a war-brig built on Lake Ontario. She was begun at Oswego in 1808, and launched as the Oneida in 1809, under the command of Lieutenant Melancthon Woolsey, U. S. N. During this year also Sackett’s Harbor was chosen as a naval station, and some military companies were stationed there. Arsenals were established by New York State in Champion Village and at Watertown, both not far from Sackett’s Harbor. And thereafter the embargo acts of one kind and another gave sufficient excuse to the people of that region to make very lively times, both afloat and ashore, until, in 1812, the war came.
In fact war began here before it was declared at Washington. The British merchant-schooner Lord Nelson was found in American waters and captured by the Oneida on May 12th. She was condemned for violating the Embargo Act. In June the British merchant-schooner Niagara was taken and sold for violating the revenue laws. These seizures were revenged after the war began by an energetic Canadian named Jones, who organized a party and captured two of a fleet of eight American merchant-schooners trying to flee from Ogdensburg to Sackett’s Harbor. The two were burned.