1812: The Navy's War (6 page)
Federalists, of course, were not happy about the Orders in Council, nor about impressment, but they were willing to tolerate them as wartime necessities. After all, once Napoleon was defeated, the need for them would disappear. And many Federalists felt that Madison had grossly exaggerated the impressment problem, pointing out that far more British seamen were serving on American merchantmen than Americans serving in the Royal Navy. “The general business of impressing American seamen was . . . not worth mooting about,” Federalist senator John Rutledge Jr. of South Carolina wrote, “where Great Britain has in her service one of our sailors we have twenty of hers on board our merchantmen.” “This whole controversy respecting sailors,” Harrison Gray Otis wrote, “was practically to us not worth mooting, we have always had ten to their one.” Napoleon had been harder on American commerce than Britain had been, Federalists maintained, seizing ships at a faster rate than the Royal Navy.
IT WAS PRECISELY this reflexive sympathy for Britain on the part of the Federalists, Republicans felt, that had encouraged London’s intransigence over the years. By viewing America through the eyes of Jefferson’s and Madison’s Federalist critics, the British became convinced that a divided country would never stand up to them. To do nothing in the face of the Orders and impressment, Republicans believed, would be to sacrifice the independence and honor of the United States, thereby bringing the entire republican experiment into disrepute, if not failure.
At only one point during Jefferson’s presidency were the Federalists and Republicans briefly united, and that was after the
Chesapeake-Leopard
affair. On June 22, 1807, fifteen miles southeast of Virginia’s Cape Henry, the 50-gun British warship
Leopard
, under Captain Salusbury Pryce Humphreys, hailed the American 36-gun frigate
Chesapeake
, under Captain James Barron. When Barron hove to, Humphreys sent over a lieutenant with a message demanding that the
Chesapeake
’s crew be mustered and searched for British deserters. As surprised as he was outraged, Barron denied there were any deserters aboard his ship and refused to muster the crew. The British lieutenant returned to the
Leopard
empty-handed.
Chesapeake-Leopard
affair. On June 22, 1807, fifteen miles southeast of Virginia’s Cape Henry, the 50-gun British warship
Leopard
, under Captain Salusbury Pryce Humphreys, hailed the American 36-gun frigate
Chesapeake
, under Captain James Barron. When Barron hove to, Humphreys sent over a lieutenant with a message demanding that the
Chesapeake
’s crew be mustered and searched for British deserters. As surprised as he was outraged, Barron denied there were any deserters aboard his ship and refused to muster the crew. The British lieutenant returned to the
Leopard
empty-handed.
Humphreys was not about to be put off, however; he was operating under strict orders from Vice Admiral Sir George Berkeley, commander of the North American Station and a rabid anti-American Tory. Within minutes of the lieutenant’s return to the
Leopard
, even as Barron belatedly prepared the
Chesapeake
for battle, Humphreys fired three broadsides into her without warning, killing three and wounding eighteen. Barron quickly struck his colors. The British lieutenant then returned and seized four of Barron’s crew, claiming they were deserters. There were probably other British deserters aboard, but the lieutenant failed to identify them. One of the men taken, Jenkin Ratford, was indeed a British deserter, but the other three were Americans. Ratford was given a quick court-martial and then hanged from the yardarm of a warship in Halifax harbor on August 31, 1807. The three Americans were sentenced to receive five hundred lashes, but that was remitted, and they wound up in jail, where one of them died. The other two remained incarcerated until returned to the deck of the
Chesapeake
in Boston five years later.
Leopard
, even as Barron belatedly prepared the
Chesapeake
for battle, Humphreys fired three broadsides into her without warning, killing three and wounding eighteen. Barron quickly struck his colors. The British lieutenant then returned and seized four of Barron’s crew, claiming they were deserters. There were probably other British deserters aboard, but the lieutenant failed to identify them. One of the men taken, Jenkin Ratford, was indeed a British deserter, but the other three were Americans. Ratford was given a quick court-martial and then hanged from the yardarm of a warship in Halifax harbor on August 31, 1807. The three Americans were sentenced to receive five hundred lashes, but that was remitted, and they wound up in jail, where one of them died. The other two remained incarcerated until returned to the deck of the
Chesapeake
in Boston five years later.
The incident caused a reaction in the United States so furious that Jefferson could have asked for a declaration of war and had the whole country united behind him, including the Federalists. He decided to avoid a war, however, for the same reason Washington had: the country was unprepared and essentially defenseless. The fact that America’s defenseless state was due to Jefferson’s own policies was an irony that would not have been lost on either Hamilton or Adams, but the fact remained that declaring war was out of the question. Instead Jefferson looked for another, more peaceful, way to change British policies.
NOTHING RANKLED AMERICANS more than the issue of impressment, but it also touched British sensitivities deeply. The Admiralty and the Perceval ministry felt that impressment was essential to the Royal Navy and thus to British security. Calling the practice into question was, in their view, tantamount to asking the country to abandon the main weapon in her life-and-death struggle with Napoleon.
At the root of the problem, however, was something the Admiralty would never admit—namely, the unnecessarily brutal conditions aboard His Majesty’s warships. So horrendous was the working environment that British tars deserted in droves, creating a manpower shortage in the Royal Navy that the Admiralty could only solve by continually impressing more men. Britain’s leaders—not just the Admiralty—steadfastly refused to recognize the true source of their problem. On the rare occasions in Parliament when any mention was made of the deplorable state of the crews, the Admiralty was quick to deny the obvious. No less a figure than Thomas Cochrane, a storied British sea captain, whom the novelist Patrick O’Brian would use as a model for the character of Jack Aubrey, brought up the taboo subject in the House of Commons. When Cochrane deplored “the decayed and heartless state of the crews,” John W. Croker, first secretary of the Admiralty, challenged him, calling his charges “grossly exaggerated, ... an absolute misrepresentation, . . . [and] a scandalous libel on the Navy.” The House cheered as Croker’s rebuttal progressed. Members simply did not want to hear the truth, not even from such an unimpeachable source as Cochrane.
Britain’s ruling class preferred the comfortable illusion that the thousands of deserters were happy tars lured away from their ships by the Americans. They could not bring themselves to think about, much less reform, the bestial conditions aboard their warships. Such indifference was all the more remarkable when one considers that warships functioned far better when working conditions were improved even slightly. No military need required the brutal treatment of sailors; wartime necessity did not mandate that trained men be treated as animals.
Tradition governed life aboard a British man-of-war, as well as the personalities of the captain and his officers. It was not uncommon for upper-class officers to be contemptuous of their crewmen, nearly all of whom were lower-class and illiterate. Discipline was harsh and often arbitrary on every warship. Being a ruthless disciplinarian never impeded an officer’s advancement. If a pressed man had a brutal, flogging skipper, his life became an intolerable hell. His only recourse was to desert.
Service in the Royal Navy was, after all, indeterminate. Once dragged aboard, an impressed man was trapped until the war—which by 1807 had already gone on for fifteen years—was over. Given the innumerable hazards on men-of-war, and the bestial punishment code, he would be lucky if he made it out alive. Impressment was thus akin to a death sentence.
Ships became prisons. Shore leave was never granted to men whom officers suspected might desert, even in the most remote locations. It was not uncommon for pressed men to spend years aboard ship without ever once being allowed on dry land. There were instances when men were so desperate to escape they deserted to forbidding, uninhabited islands. An American naval prisoner-of-war, Benjamin Waterhouse, wrote while in Dartmoor prison, “an American in England pines to get home, while an Englishman and an Irishman longs to become an American citizen.”
Bad food was universal and made worse by contractors who had a habit of cheating the Royal Navy. Furthermore, the quantity of food aboard ship was always reduced by the custom of allowing the purser to keep some of it for his own profit. Food was measured aboard in pounds, but the purser’s pound amounted to fourteen ounces, rather than sixteen. He took the extra two ounces for himself and shorted the men in their meals.
Alcohol was liberally dispensed each day aboard every ship to dull the pain: a half pint of hard liquor mixed with water was given out at noon, followed by a pint of wine at four o’clock. The alcohol did not need to be consumed on the spot, or even that day. Saved and accumulated, it became a sort of currency aboard all warships. Every scheme was used to obtain it, particularly when the ship was in port. A man could get whatever he needed whenever he could pay the price. Drunkenness, predictably, was a continuing problem, and dealt with severely, usually by a liberal dose of the fearsome cat-o’-nine-tails. Four dozen lashes—enough to kill some men—was a common sentence for being in one’s cups.
The cat was the preferred tool for effecting discipline. A single blow would knock a man down. To give him a dozen or more—the usual dose—his wrists had to be tied securely to a hard-as-iron oak grating, which in turn kept his body from giving, making the blows all the more terrible. Reactions to whipping varied greatly from man to man. Some would die from a few lashes; others could withstand far more. Regardless, the severity of the punishment was frightening, and no man witnessing it ever forgot it.
The first stroke from the cat broke open the flesh, causing bleeding and bruising. After two, pain in the lungs, as well as the back, was severe. As the beating progressed, blood from biting one’s tongue nearly off was common, as was the face turning a deep reddish brown. The back soon became a bloody mess, turning black; one seaman described a lacerated back as “inhuman [resembling] roasted meat burnt . . . before a scorching fire.” In 1806 the Admiralty removed the injunction against sentencing to more than a dozen lashes without a court-martial because captains never observed it. After 1806 they were free to order whatever they pleased, and they did.
Samuel Leech, a British seaman, gave this account of the practices of Captain John S. Carden, skipper of the British frigate H.M.S.
Macedonian
. Carden was an experienced officer with a good record, not judged particularly cruel by his peers or, indeed, by later historians. “A midshipman named Gale, a most rascally, unprincipled fellow, found his pocket handkerchief in possession of one of the crew. He charged the man with stealing it. It was in vain that the poor wretch asserted that he found it under his hammock.” A court-martial sentenced Gale to receive three hundred lashes through the fleet and one year’s imprisonment. “Fifty were laid on alongside of the
Macedonian
, in conformity with a common practice of inflicting the most strokes at the first ship, in order that the gory back of the criminal may strike terror into the crews of the other ships. This poor tortured man bore two hundred and twenty, and was pronounced by the attending surgeon unfit to receive the rest.” Miraculously, the man survived, but when he recovered his health, Captain Carden ordered him to receive the remaining eighty lashes.
Macedonian
. Carden was an experienced officer with a good record, not judged particularly cruel by his peers or, indeed, by later historians. “A midshipman named Gale, a most rascally, unprincipled fellow, found his pocket handkerchief in possession of one of the crew. He charged the man with stealing it. It was in vain that the poor wretch asserted that he found it under his hammock.” A court-martial sentenced Gale to receive three hundred lashes through the fleet and one year’s imprisonment. “Fifty were laid on alongside of the
Macedonian
, in conformity with a common practice of inflicting the most strokes at the first ship, in order that the gory back of the criminal may strike terror into the crews of the other ships. This poor tortured man bore two hundred and twenty, and was pronounced by the attending surgeon unfit to receive the rest.” Miraculously, the man survived, but when he recovered his health, Captain Carden ordered him to receive the remaining eighty lashes.
“No plea of necessity can be successfully urged in behalf of whipping men,” Leech wrote. “Punishment leads to revenge; revenge to punishment. What is intended to cure, only aggravates the disease; the evil enlarges under the remedy; voluntary subordination ceases; gloom overspreads the crew; fear fills the breasts of the officers; the ship becomes a miniature of the house of fiends. While, on the other hand, mild regulations, enforced without an appeal to brute force, are easily carried into operation.”
Abysmal pay added to a tar’s disillusionment. One of the chief complaints of the mutineers at Spithead in 1797 was that seamen in the Royal Navy had not received a raise in one hundred and fifty years, and conditions had not improved much since. In theory ordinary seamen received a bounty of four pounds when they originally signed on, plus eighteen pounds a year, but they received none of this until their ship returned to England and the crew had been paid off. The Admiralty argued that if a sailor had money, he would be tempted to desert. Seamen were deserting anyway, of course, but the Admiralty did not want to give them an added incentive. On long voyages men often had to go to the purser to purchase items such as clothing at grossly inflated prices. “Hence, what with poor articles, high charges and false charges,” Leech argued, “the purser almost always had a claim that made Jack’s actual receipts for two or three years service, woefully small.” Pay in the Royal Navy was always lower than in the British merchant service and much lower than in the American navy or aboard American merchantmen.
If a man were lucky enough to stay alive, he could be returning home at last, looking forward to being on shore, having money, obtaining fresh food, and a decent night’s sleep, yet meet with one more cruel trick. Instead of being allowed ashore he could be herded onto another warship standing out to sea, without ever setting foot on land, even though he might have already served years at sea. Worse, men wounded in action were routinely dismissed from the service, sent home with their wounds not yet healed, and their pay summarily cut off. “Here was encouragement for seamen to fight for their king and country!” wrote a bitter impressed man. “A coolie in India was better off!”
To save themselves from a cruel imprisonment and early death, British tars deserted by the thousands, many to American ships. The Admiralty estimated the number serving in American vessels during the Napoleonic wars to be between 15,000 and 20,000. In a Royal Navy that employed 145,000 men, that was a significant figure. Yet had the Admiralty only improved life for the lower deck, men would not have deserted in the numbers they did, and there would have been no need to stop American vessels to search for them. A few modest changes would have gone a long way to ensure the required number of men: an increase in enlistment bonuses and wages; disbursement on a regular basis, rather than at long intervals; a set time of enlistment; a more humane punishment code; a modicum of respect for seamen; more and better food, including fresh vegetables when available; better medical treatment; a definite leave policy; pensions for the permanently injured; and a more equitable distribution of prize money. It could reasonably be supposed that patriotic men would have joined the Royal Navy when the country was fighting for its life against its traditional enemy, France.
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