It is thus seen that the Shannon received from shot alone only about half the damage the Chesapeake did; the latter was thoroughly beaten at the guns, in spite of what some American authors say to the contrary. And her victory was not in the slightest degree to be attributed to, though it may have been slightly hastened by, accident. Training and discipline won the victory, as often before; only in this instance the training and discipline were against us.
It is interesting to notice that the Chesapeake battered the Shannon's hull far more than either the Java, Guerrière, or Macedonian did the hulls of their opponents, and that she suffered less in return (not in loss but in damage) than they did. The Chesapeake was a better fighter than either the Java, Guerrière, or Macedonian, and could have captured any one of them. The Shannon of course did less damage than any of the American 44's, probably just about in the proportion of the difference in force.
Almost all American writers have treated the capture of the Chesapeake as if it was due simply to a succession of unfortunate accidents; for example, Cooper, with his usual cheerful optimism, says that the incidents of the battle, excepting its short duration, are "altogether the results of the chances of war," and that it was mainly decided by "fortuitous events as unconnected with any particular merit on the one side as they are with any particular demerit on the other." [Footnote: The worth of such an explanation is very aptly gauged in General Alexander S. Webb's "The Peninsula; McClellan's Campaign of 1862" (New York, 1881), p. 35, where he speaks of "those unforeseen or uncontrollable agencies which are vaguely described as the 'fortune of war,' but which usually prove to be the superior ability or resources of the antagonist.">[ Most naval men consider it a species of treason to regard the defeat as due to any thing but extraordinary ill fortune. And yet no disinterested reader can help acknowledging that the true reason of the defeat was the very simple one that the Shannon fought better than the Chesapeake. It has often been said that up to the moment when the ships came together the loss and damage suffered by each were about the same. This is not true, and even if it was, would not affect the question. The heavy loss on board the Shannon did not confuse or terrify the thoroughly trained men with their implicit reliance on their leaders; and the experienced officers were ready to defend any point that was menaced. An equal or greater amount of loss aboard the Chesapeake disheartened and confused the raw crew, who simply had not had the time or chance to become well disciplined. Many of the old hands, of course, kept their wits and their pluck, but the novices and the disaffected did not. Similarly with the officers; some, as the Court of Inquiry found, had not kept to their posts, and all being new to each other and the ship, could not show to their best. There is no doubt that the Chesapeake was beaten at the guns before she was boarded. Had the ships not come together, the fight would have been longer, the loss greater, and more nearly equal; but the result would have been the same. Cooper says that the enemy entered with great caution, and so slowly that twenty resolute men could have repulsed him. It was no proof of caution for Captain Broke and his few followers to leap on board, unsupported, and then they only waited for the main body to come up; and no twenty men could have repulsed such boarders as followed Broke. The fight was another lesson, with the parties reversed, to the effect that want of training and discipline is a bad handicap. Had the Chesapeake's crew been in service as many months as the Shannon's had been years, such a captain as Lawrence would have had his men perfectly in hand; they would not have been cowed by their losses, nor some of the officers too demoralized to act properly, and the material advantages which the Chesapeake possessed, although not very great, would probably have been enough to give her a good chance of victory. It is well worth noticing that the only thoroughly disciplined set of men aboard (all, according to James himself, by the way, native Americans), namely, the marines, did excellently, as shown by the fact that three fourths of their number were among the killed and wounded. The foreigners aboard the Chesapeake did not do as well as the Americans, but it is nonsense to ascribe the defeat in any way to them; it was only rendered rather more disastrous by their actions. Most of the English authors give very fair accounts of the battle, except that they hardly allude to the peculiar disadvantages under which the Chesapeake suffered when she entered into it. Thus, James thinks the Java was unprepared because she had only been to sea six weeks; but does not lay any weight on the fact that the Chesapeake had been out only as many hours.
Altogether the best criticism on the fight is that written by M. de la Gravière. [Footnote: "Guerres Maritimes," ii, 272.] "It is impossible to avoid seeing in the capture of the Chesapeake a new proof of the enormous power of a good organization, when it has received the consecration of a few years' actual service on the sea. On this occasion, in effect, two captains equally renowned, the honor of two navies, were opposed to each other on two ships of the same tonnage and number of guns. Never had the chances seemed better balanced, but Sir Philip Broke had commanded the Shannon for nearly seven years, while Captain Lawrence had only commanded the Chesapeake for a few days. The first of these frigates had cruised for eighteen months on the coast of America; the second was leaving port. One had a crew long accustomed to habits of strict obedience; the other was manned by men who had just been engaged in mutiny. The Americans were wrong to accuse fortune on this occasion. Fortune was not fickle, she was merely logical. The Shannon captured the Chesapeake on the first of June, 1813, but on the 14th of September, 1806, the day when he took command of his frigate, Captain Broke had begun to prepare the glorious termination to this bloody affair."
Hard as it is to breathe a word against such a man as Lawrence, a very Bayard of the seas, who was admired as much for his dauntless bravery as he was loved for his gentleness and uprightness, it must be confessed that he acted rashly. And after he had sailed, it was, as Lord Howard Douglass has pointed out, a tactical error, however chivalric to neglect the chance of luffing across the Shannon's stern to rake her; exactly as it was a tactical error of his equally chivalrous antagonist to have let him have such an opportunity. Hull would not have committed either error, and would, for the matter of that, have been an overmatch for either commander. But it must always be remembered that Lawrence's encounters with the English had not been such as to give him a high opinion of them. The only foe he had fought had been inferior in strength, it is true, but had hardly made any effective resistance. Another sloop, of equal, if not superior force, had tamely submitted to blockade for several days, and had absolutely refused to fight. And there can be no doubt that the Chesapeake, unprepared though she was, would have been an overmatch for the Guerrière, Macedonian, or Java. Altogether it is hard to blame Lawrence for going out, and in every other respect his actions never have been, nor will be, mentioned, by either friend or foe, without the warmest respect. But that is no reason for insisting that he was ruined purely by an adverse fate. We will do far better to recollect that as much can be learned from reverses as from victories. Instead of flattering ourselves by saying the defeat was due to chance, let us try to find out what the real cause was, and then take care that it does not have an opportunity to act again. A little less rashness would have saved Lawrence's life and his frigate, while a little more audacity on one occasion would have made Commodore Chauncy famous for ever. And whether a lesson is to be learned or not, a historian should remember that his profession is not that of a panegyrist. The facts of the case unquestionably are that Captain Broke, in fair fight, within sight of the enemy's harbor, proved conqueror over a nominally equal and in reality slightly superior force; and that this is the only single-ship action of the war in which the victor was weaker in force than his opponent. So much can be gathered by reading only the American accounts. Moreover accident had little or nothing to do with the gaining of the victory. The explanation is perfectly easy; Lawrence and Broke were probably exactly equal in almost every thing that goes to make up a first-class commander, but one had trained his crew for seven years, and the other was new to the ship, to the officers, and to the men, and the last to each other. The Chesapeake's crew must have been of fine material, or they would not have fought so well as they did.
So much for the American accounts. On the other hand, the capture of the Chesapeake was, and is, held by many British historians to "conclusively prove" a good many different things; such as, that if the odds were anything like equal, a British frigate could always whip an American, that in a hand-to-hand conflict such would invariably be the case, etc.; and as this was the only single-ship action of the war in which the victor was the inferior in force, most British writers insist that it reflected more honor on them than all the frigate actions of 1812 put together did on the Americans.
These assertions can be best appreciated by reference to a victory won by the French in the year of the Battle of the Nile. On the 14th of December, 1798, after two hours' conflict, the French 24-gun corvette Bayonnaise captured, by boarding, the English 32-gun frigate Ambuscade. According to James the Ambuscade threw at a broadside 262 pounds of shot, and was manned by 190 men, while the Bayonnaise threw 150 pounds, and had on board supernumeraries and passenger soldiers enough to make in all 250 men. According to the French historian Rouvier [Footnote: "Histoire des Marins Français sous la République," par Charles Rouvier, Lieutenant de Vaisseau. Paris, 1868.] the broadside force was 246 pounds against 80 pounds; according to Troude [Footnote: "Batailles Navales.">[ it was 270 pounds against 112. M. Léon Guérin, in his voluminous but exceedingly prejudiced and one-sided work, [Footnote: "Histoire Maritime de France" (par Léon Guérin, Historien titulaire de la Marine, Membre de la Legion d'Honneur), vi. 142 (Paris, 1852).] makes the difference even greater. At any rate the English vessel was vastly the superior in force, and was captured by boarding, after a long and bloody conflict in which she lost 46, and her antagonist over 50, men. During all the wars waged with the Republic and the Empire, no English vessel captured a French one as much superior to itself as the Ambuscade was to the Bayonnaise, precisely as in the war of 1812 no American vessel captured a British opponent as much superior to itself as the Chesapeake was to the Shannon. Yet no sensible man can help acknowledging, in spite of these and a few other isolated instances, that at that time the French were inferior to the English, and the latter to the Americans.
It is amusing to compare the French histories of the English with the English histories of the Americans, and to notice the similarity of the arguments they use to detract from their opponents' fame. Of course I do not allude to such writers as Lord Howard Douglass or Admiral de la Gravière, but to men like William James and Léon Guérin, or even O. Troude. James is always recounting how American ships ran away from British ones, and Guérin tells as many anecdotes of British ships who fled from French foes. James reproaches the Americans for adopting a "Parthian" mode of warfare, instead of "bringing to in a bold and becoming manner." Precisely the same reproaches are used by the French writers, who assert that the English would not fight "fairly," but acquired an advantage by manoeuvring. James lays great stress on the American long guns; so does Lieutenant Rouvier on the British carronades. James always tells how the Americans avoided the British ships, when the crews of the latter demanded to be led aboard; Troude says the British always kept at long shot, while the French sailors "demandérent, à grands cris, l'abordage." James says the Americans "hesitated to grapple" with their foes "unless they possessed a twofold superiority"; Guérin that the English "never dared attack" except when they possessed "une supériorité énorme." The British sneer at the "mighty dollar"; the French at the "eternal guinea." The former consider Decatur's name as "sunk" to the level of Porter's or Bainbridge's; the latter assert that the "presumptuous Nelson" was inferior to any of the French admirals of the time preceding the Republic. Says James: "The Americans only fight well when they have the superiority of force on their side"; and Lieutenant Rouvier: "Never have the English vanquished us with an undoubted inferiority of force."
On June 12, 1813, the small cutter Surveyor, of 6 12-pound carronades, was lying in York River, in the Chesapeake, under the command of Mr. William S. Travis; her crew consisted of but 15 men. [Footnote: Letter of W. S. Travis, June 16, 1813.] At nightfall she was attacked by the boats of the Narcissus frigate, containing about 50 men, under the command of Lieutenant John Creerie. [Footnote: James, vi. 334.] None of the carronades could be used; but Mr. Travis made every preparation that he could for defence. The Americans waited till the British were within pistol shot before they opened their fire; the latter dashed gallantly on, however, and at once carried the cutter. But though brief, the struggle was bloody; 5 of the Americans were wounded, and of the British 3 were killed and 7 wounded. Lieutenant Creerie considered his opponents to have shown so much bravery that he returned Mr. Travis his sword, with a letter as complimentary to him as it was creditable to the writer. [Footnote: The letter, dated June 13th, is as follows: "Your gallant and desperate attempt to defend your vessel against more than double your number, on the night of the 12th instant, excited such admiration on the part of your opponents as I have seldom witnessed, and induced me to return you the sword you had so nobly used, in testimony of mine. Our poor fellows have suffered severely, occasioned chiefly, if not solely, by the precautions you had taken to prevent surprise. In short, I am at a loss which to admire most, the previous arrangement aboard the Surveyor, or the determined manner in which her deck was disputed inch by inch. I am, sir," etc.]
As has been already mentioned, the Americans possessed a large force of gun-boats at the beginning of the war. Some of these were fairly sea-worthy vessels, of 90 tons burden, sloop—or schooner-rigged, and armed with one or two long, heavy guns, and sometime with several light carronades to repel boarders. [Footnote: According to a letter from Captain Hugh G. Campbell (in the Naval Archives, "Captains' Letters," 1812, vol. ii. Nos. 21 and 192), the crews were distributed as follows: ten men and a boy to a long 32. seven men and a boy to a long 9. and five men and a boy to a carronade, exclusive of petty officers. Captain Campbell complains of the scarcity of men, and rather naively remarks that he is glad the marines have been withdrawn from the gun boats, as this may make the commanders of the latter keep a brighter lookout than formerly.] Gun-boats of this kind, together with the few small cutters owned by the government, were serviceable enough. They were employed all along the shores of Georgia and the Carolinas, and in Long Island Sound, in protecting the coasting trade by convoying parties of small vessels from one port to another, and preventing them from being molested by the boats of any of the British frigates. They also acted as checks upon the latter in their descents upon the towns and plantations, occasionally capturing their boats and tenders, and forcing them to be very cautious in their operations. They were very useful in keeping privateers off the coast, and capturing them when they came too far in. The exploits of those on the southern coast will be mentioned as they occurred. Those in Long Island Sound never came into collision with the foe, except for a couple of slight skirmishes at very long range; but in convoying little fleets of coasters, and keeping at bay the man-of-war boats sent to molest them, they were invaluable; and they also kept the Sound clear of hostile privateers.