Before Perry’s work at Warren fairly began, the British ship Favorite, bearing the olive branch, arrived at New York, February 11, 1815. It was too late to save the bloody battle of New Orleans, or the capture of the Cyane and Levant. The treaty of Ghent had been signed December 3, 1813; but neither steam nor electricity were then at hand to forefend ninety days of war.
The navy, from the year 1815, was kept up on a war footing; and, for three years, the sum of two millions of dollars was appropriated to this arm of the service. Commodore Porter, eager to improve and expand our commerce, conceived the project of a voyage of exploration around the world. The plan embraced an extended visit to the islands of the Pacific, the north-west coast of America, Japan and China. The expedition was to consist of several vessels of war. The project of this first American expeditionary voyage fell stillborn, and was left to slumber until Matthew Perry and John Rodgers accomplished more than its purpose.
The seas now being safe to American commerce, our merchants at once took advantage of their opportunity. Mr. Slidell offered his son-in-law, then but twenty years of age, the command of a merchant vessel loaded for Holland. He applied for furlough. As war with Algiers threatened, permission was not granted, and Matthew and James Alexander Perry began service on board the Chippewa. This was the finest of three brigs in the flying squadron, which had been built to ravage British commerce in the Mediterranean. Serving, inactively, on the brig Chippewa, until December 20, 1815, Perry procured furlough, and in command of a merchant vessel, owned by his father, made a voyage to Holland. He was engaged in the commercial marine until 1817, when he re-entered the navy.
The Virginian Horatio, son of the freed slave, who to-day ploughs up the skull of some Yorick, Confederate or Federal, turns to his paternal Hamlet, of frosty pow, to ask: “What was dey fightin’ about?” A similar question asks the British Peterkin and the American lad, of this generation, concerning a phase of our history early in this century.
Besides being “our second war for national independence,” the struggle of 1812 was emphatically for “sailors’ rights.” At the beginning of hostilities there were on record in the State Department, at Washington, 6,527 cases of impressed American seamen. This was, doubtless, but a small part of the whole number, which probably reached 20,000; or enough to man our navy five times over. In 1811, 2,548 impressed American seamen were in British prisons, refusing to serve against their country, as the British Admirality reported to the House of Commons, February 1, 1815. In January, 1811, according to Lord Castlereagh’s speech of February 8, 1813, 3,300 men, claiming to be Americans, were serving in the British navy.[[3]] The war settled some questions, but left the main one of the right of search, claimed by Great Britain, still open, and not to be removed from the field of dispute, until Mr. Seward’s diplomacy in the Trent affair compelled its relinquishment forever. Three years struggle with a powerful enemy, had done wonders in developing the resources of the United States and in consolidating the Federal union. The American nation, by this war, wholly severed the leading strings which bound her to the “mother country” and to Europe, and shook off the colonial spirit for all time.
Among the significant appropriations made by Congress during the war, was one for $500 to be spent in collecting, transmitting, preserving, and displaying the flags and standards captured from the enemy.
On the 4th of July, 1818, the flag of the United States of America, which, during the war of 1812, bore fifteen stripes and fifteen stars in its cluster, returned to its old form. The number of stripes, representing the original thirteen states, remained as the standard, not to be added to or subtracted from. In the blue field the stars could increase with the growth of the nation. In the American flag are happily blended the symbols of the old and the new, of history and prophecy, of conservatism and progress, of the stability of the unchanging past with the promise and potency of the future.
| [3] | Roosevelt’s “Naval History of the War of 1812.” |