As only one-fifth of the sailors in the navy were native Americans, Perry took intense pride in the enterprise of rearing up men for the national service, in whom patriotism would be natural, inherited and heartfelt. He cheerfully met all the difficulties in the way—such as parents claiming their boys on various pretexts, and the law-suits which followed. To the boys themselves, Perry was as kind as he was exacting. He believed in tempting boys in the sense of proving them with responsibility enough to make men of them. Sufficient shore liberty was given, and once in a while, even the joys of the circus were allowed them.
He proposed to man one of the new national vessels with a crew of his trained apprentices, and under picked officers to send them on a long cruise to demonstrate the success of his system. When the brig Somers was launched April 16, 1842, the time seemed ripe, and he obtained permission of the Department to carry out his plan. The vessel had been built, and the boys had been trained under his own eye. After a conference with Secretary Upshur in September, it was arranged she should make a trip to Sierra Leone and back, occupying ninety days, traversing seven thousand miles, and visiting the ports or colonies of four great nations. A few days afterwards the Somers sailed away, full of happy hearts beating with joyful anticipations, yet destined to make the most painful record of any vessel in the American navy.
On this sad subject, either to state facts or give an opinion, we have nothing to say. The real or imaginary mutiny and its consequences did much to injure and finally destroy the apprenticeship system as founded by Perry. Other reasons for failure lay in the fact that boys of good family expected by enlistment to become line and staff officers. Disappointed in their groundless hopes, they deserted or wanted to be discharged. Failing in this, they sought release by civil process.
By the system of 1863, the same failure resulted. In 1872 “training ships,” as we now understand the term, were put in use. On June 20, 1874, the Marine School Bill was passed which created the present admirable system, which has little or no organic connection with any other system previously in vogue. It is now possible, with the Annapolis Naval Academy and the School-ship system, to provide abundantly both officers and sailors for the military marine of the United States. In any history of the naval-apprenticeship system of the United States navy, despite the claims made by others, or the many names associated with its origin or development, the name of Matthew Perry must not be lost sight of as prime mover.
VII.
DUELLING.
Matthew Perry never fought a duel, or acted as a second, though duelling was part of the established code of honor among naval men of his school and age, and provocation was not lacking. On his return from the cruise in the North Carolina, an unpleasant episode occurred, growing out of idle gossip and the malignant jealousy felt towards an officer of superior parts by inferiors unable to understand one so intensely earnest as Matthew Perry. The manner in which Perry dealt with the man and the matter strengthens the claim we have made for him as an educator of the United States Navy. The conversation at a dinner party in Philadelphia filtered into the ear of a certain lieutenant in Washington, who reported that Captain M—— had spoken of Matthew Perry as “a d——d rascal.” Perry at once took measures to ferret out the anonymous slanderer. He first learned from Captain M—— the total falsity of the report, and then demanded from the disseminator of the scandal the name of his informant, which was refused. Thereupon Perry wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, pleading the general injury to the service from calumnies and unfounded reports. The Secretary wrote to the offending lieutenant to tell the truth. The latter pleaded the “privacy of his room,” “sacred confidence among gentlemen,” and declined to give the name of the person “understood” to have made the offensive remark to him. The Secretary, Hon. Samuel L. Southard, in a letter which is a model of terse English, read the offender a lecture on the unmanly folly of dabbling in idle gossip, and laid down the principle of holding the disseminator of reports responsible for the truth of statements made on the authority of another. The triangular and voluminous correspondence from Boston, Washington and Norfolk, from November 15th 1827, to April 1828, may be read in the United States Navy Archives. Perry demanded a court-martial, if necessary, to clear himself from unjust suspicion. It was not needful. His tenacity and perseverance conquered. The gossipper begged permission to withdraw his remark, and then crawled into oblivion.
In this paper war, extending over several months, the officer whose victories both in peace and war were many, scored points in behalf of truth and good morals, of the discipline and order of the Navy, and of the advance of civilization. Heretofore, the custom of duelling had largely prevailed in the corps, and to this savage tribunal of arbitration a thousand petty questions of personal honor had been brought. Yet despite all arguments in favor of the bloody code, which believers in or admirers of its supposed benefits may fabricate in its favor, the fact remains that it served but an insignificant purpose. Its direct influence was slight in repressing those petty personal differences which, belonging to human nature, have such congenial soil in a crowded ship. Duelling was a cure but no preventative, the killing being as frequent as the curing.
Matthew Perry might have challenged the lieutenant, and, like scores of his brother officers, appealed to the savage code; but having long pondered upon and frequently witnessed the slight benefit accruing from the costly sacrifice of life and limb from duelling, he aimed to cut out from the life of the service the whole system, root and branch, and to substitute the more rigid test of personal responsibility. In choosing the slower and, in old naval eyes, more inglorious method of correspondence, and appeal to considerate judgment of his peers in court, he exhibited more moral courage, showed his true character and motive, and lifted higher the splendid standard of the American Navy. To the formation of that esprit of discipline which all now concede to be “the life of the service,” Perry, in this episode nobly contributed. He made the pen mightier than the sword.
Despite his clear record on this subject, made thus early, he came very near being made the victim of a political quarrel, and a reformer’s zeal. Readers of the works of John Quincy Adams may get an impression unjust to Captain Matthew Perry, because of the Resolution of Inquiry, December 3d, 1838, “into the conduct of Andrew Stevenson (United States Minister to Great Britain, and J. Q. Adams’s political enemy) in his controversy with Daniel O. Connell, as well as the participation of Captain Perry in that affair.”[[70]] To make a long story short, Mr. Adams, in his political zeal to injure an enemy and moral purpose to abolish “the detestable custom of private war,” struck the wrong man. All the information on which Mr. Adams based his inquiry was contained, as he confessed, in “those published letters of James Hamilton of South Carolina;” whereas, Mr. Hamilton regretted and publicly apologized for writing the principal letter which gave rise to the other two.[[71]] The whole controversy is not without interest, and humor of both the Irish and American sort. It is possible that Perry never knew till he found his name dragged into Congress, what use of his name had been made by Hamilton. So far as manifested in his official record,[[72]] Matthew Perry’s example, influence and energetic action were totally opposed to duelling. In his African cruises, and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we find him earnestly laboring to root out of existence a practice at war with Christian civilization.