Commodore Chauncey then rebuked him in his reply, and set forth the worth of the negro seaman:
"Sir,—I have been duly honored with your letters of the twenty-third and twenty-sixth ultimo, and notice your anxiety for men and officers. I am equally anxious to furnish you; and no time shall be lost in sending officers and men to you as soon as the public service will allow me to send them from this lake. I regret that you are not pleased with the men sent you by Messrs Champlin and Forest; for, to my knowledge, a part of them are not surpassed by any seamen we have in the fleet: and I have yet to learn that the color of the skin, or the cut and trimmings of the coat, can effect a man's qualifications or usefulness. I have nearly fifty blacks on board of this ship, and many of them are among my best men; and those people you call soldiers have been to sea from two to seventeen years; and I presume that you will find them as good and useful as any men on board of your vessel; at least if you can judge by comparison; for those which we have on board of this ship are attentive and obedient, and, as far as I can judge, many of them excellent seamen: at any rate, the men sent to Lake Erie have been selected with a view of sending a fair proportion of petty officers and seamen; and I presume, upon examination, it will be found that they are equal to those upon this lake."—Mackenzie's Life of Perry, vol. i. pp. 186, 187.
The battle of Lake Erie is the most memorable naval battle fought with the British; of it Rossiter Johnson, in his "History of the War of 1812," in the description of the engagement, says:
"As the question of the fighting qualities of the black man has since been considerably discussed, it is worth noting that in this bloody and brilliant battle a large number of Perry's men were negroes."
It was not left to Commodores Chauncey and Perry, solely, to applaud them; there was not an American war vessel, perhaps, whose crew, in part, was not made up of negroes, as the accounts of various sea fights prove. And they are entitled to no small share of the meed of praise given the American seamen, who fought and won victory over the British. Not only in the Navy, but on board the privateers,[9] the American negro did service, as the following extract will show:
"Extract of a Letter from Nathaniel Shaler, Commander of the private-armed Schooner Gov. Tompkins, to his Agent in New York.
At Sea, Jan. 1, 1813.
"Before I could get our light sails on, and almost before I could turn round, I was under the guns, not of a transport, but of a large frigate! and not more than a quarter of a mile from her. * * Her first broadside killed two men and wounded six others * * My officers conducted themselves in a way that would have done honor to a more permanent service * * * The name of one of my poor fellows who was killed ought to be registered in the book of fame, and remembered with reverence as long as bravery is considered a virtue. He was a black man by the name of John Johnson. A twenty-four pound shot struck him in the hip, and took away all the lower part of his body. In this state, the poor brave fellow lay on the deck, and several times exclaimed to his shipmates, 'Fire away, my boy: no haul a color down' The other was a black man, by the name of John Davis, and was struck in much the same way. He fell near me, and several times requested to be thrown overboard, saying he was only in the way of others.
"When America has such tars, she has little to fear from the tyrants of the ocean."—Nile's Weekly Register, Saturday, Feb. 26, 1814.
As in the late war of the rebellion, the negroes offered their services at the outset when volunteers were called for, and the true patriots at the North sought to have their services accepted; but the government being in the control of the opponents of universal freedom and the extension of the rights of citizenship to the negro, the effort to admit him into the ranks of the army, even in separate organizations, was futile. At the same time American whites would not enlist to any great extent, and but for the tide of immigration, which before the war had set in from Ireland, the fighting on shore would probably not have lasted six months; certainly the invasion of Canada would not have been attempted.