by Barry Hastings
This war was a quarrel
over seaman’s rights and the right to free oceangoing trade. It occurred during a period when England’s main adversary in a war to the knife, was first Revolutionary France, quickly followed by Napoleonic France.
Bonaparte was at war with England and most of the rest of Europe at one time or another, through the 1790s through 1815. Both nations made themselves a scourge to ships and seamen of the new-minted United States. Their methods were crude and cruel. They stopped our seagoing vessels on the high seas, kidnapped sailors, and often forced them to involuntary service in the Royal Navy.
It irked hell out of most Americans, those in the Southern and Western states, in particular. Upper East Coast Americans, deeply involved in ocean trade, were a bit more hesitant, though they continued paying taxes, and supporting our sea-going forces. New Englanders had many of the same problems earlier with the French, and had soundly whipped them in 23 sea fights, 1797 -1798. Our navy fought three victorious battles in our large, beautiful, powerful new frigates. Twenty more were fought and won by the U.S. Revenue Marine, later known as the U.S. Coast Guard.
Those 23 victories at sea were enough to satisfy Napoleon, who agreed not to interfere with American ships or sailors again, and kept his promise. He had enough to worry about with the Royal Navy, Admiral Lord Nelson, Admiral Lord Cochrane, and a fleet comprised of well over 200 British ships of the line (battleships of the day), and scores of frigates and smaller ships.
The British were confident in their superiority at sea, and continued to enforce the Order-in-Council of 1807, which blockaded all French seaports, and insisted on all neutral vessels calling at British ports to pay taxes on cargo, before making deliveries anywhere in Europe. Citizens of the United States remained touchy about the Royal Navy practice of stopping American ships, and impressment of American sailors they accused of being deserters from the RN. Most of them were not, but enough were to thoroughly cloud the issue.
The U.S. government passed the Embargo Act of 1807 (denying trade with England), and in 1809, the Non-intercourse Act. A third attempt to control British misbehavior was passed in 1810. It removed trade restrictions, but also provided for a revival of non-intercourse against either Britain or France — whichever failed to lift its blockade, or stop all harassment. The Brits failed to act, and President James Madison signed a Declaration of War on June 18, 1812.
As has been our practice since 1775, we were completely unready for war, but chose to fight anyway. At sea, we had begun building and launching new warships of an innovative design. They were called Frigates (next largest warships to Line of Battle ships), though much larger than the frigates of both England and France (mostly 28 guns, to 38 gun vessels). The new American frigates were longer, wider, deeper and carried a much larger area of sail, and much heavier weapons — up to 50 twenty-four pounders.) The average English frigate carried a main battery of 18-pound cannon, though sometimes carried a few heavier, shorter range, but hard pounding carronades, that threw much heavier shot, though at much shorter range (shot that weighed as much as 60 pounds. As the cannon-casting processors learned their trade, they grew much larger and threw even heavier shot).
The American frigate U.S.S. Essex,, built in under a year in Essex County, Mass., and pretty much armed with only carronades, proved the weakness of a main battery of only carronades. Two British ships, a frigate and a sloop of war, trapped her in Valparaiso Harbor, Chile), and blew her to a wreck with 12 and 18 pound long guns, captured the wreck, took it to England and re-built her. Then they re-commissioned her as His Majesty’s Ship (HMS) Essex, and rubbed her in our nasal passages for years. The Brits often gave warships captured after a stiff fight the same name they’d previously carried. Essex fought hard in the battle, suffered many casualties, but barely landed a blow with her short-range carronades. British officers were astounded at how long and hard they fought, losing every stage of the fight.
(The Royal Navy still carries newer ships on her ship-list with French, Spanish, and hard-fighting American warship names. The last I knew for certain, they still had a HMS Essex on the rolls. They don’t like to think about the U.S.S. Constitution (as the French dislike thinking about Captain Thomas Truxton and the American frigate, U.S.S. Constellation, during our Quasi-war at sea with the French, 1797-99.) More on Truxton and the USS Constellation, next week, or the following. Both French, and later, the British gave interference with American ocean-going trade, and illegal seizure of our navy’s sailors a try, got away with it for a while, and in the end paid a stiff price.
American citizens were also irked by British trouble-making along our border with Canada, where they’d been stirring up trouble among the earliest Americans, particularly Chief Tecumseh and his Shawnee warriors. When Shawnee attacks led to a pitched battle between Shawnee tribesmen and U.S. soldiers at Tippecanoe, late in the fall of 1811, frontier dwellers in the West and Northwest raised a growing complaint the British must be whipped, to insure border security from Britain’s Indian allies along the whole U.S./Canadian border. As during the American War for Independence, almost our first act of the war was an attempt to invade Canada that didn’t fare well. The mounting American chorus for war was soon joined by expansionist Congressmen from Western and Southern States, and citizens occupying the territories, and earmarked for Statehood (the “Warhawks”), many of whom saw an opportunity to grab Florida, as well as well as Canada.
New American naval frigates won three duels with Royal Navy ships in 1812. In the first, U.S.S. Constitution earned her nickname when her crewmen observed big (Ship of the Line big) cannonballs bouncing off her (minimum twelve-inch thick) live oak planking. She beat the whey out of HMS Guerriere, carried her captive into harbor. Most of the rest of the war on water occurred on the Great Lakes — Michigan, Erie, Ontario, and Lake Champlain.
USS Constitution earned a verse in the patriotic song, Yankee Doodle.
The Constitution long will be the glory of our Navy,
For when she fights a foreign foe She sends him to ‘Old Davey.’
Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc., etc.
Despite the limited success we enjoyed early in the war at sea, and in capturing Detroit, by early summer of 1814, the Brits still controlled access to Lake Michigan and the North portion of the Mississippi River; as well as all of Canada. In the end, heroic work, planning, and fighting spirit, of sailors who built their own ships on shores of the Great Lakes, then fought a bigger (more and bigger ships) British fleet, manned by trained English navy seamen, to defeat, must have mortified the King and his Admiralty. Later that year an amphibious force of English warships, large and small, and many British soldiers, landed from transports in Chesapeake Bay. They disgorged thousands of soldiers (and many naval gun crews for added support), then beat hell out of our pathetic army of the day (mostly the old, still unreliable militia, as we didn’t have much of an army), fought their way up to D.C., burned the Washington, Naval Yard, and a raft of public buildings, including the White House. President Madison fled the city. His wife stayed, saved many national artifacts, became a beloved heroine.
It was not a mean-spirited act the Brits committed, but done in reprisal for our burning the town of York, on the shores of Lake Ontario in Canada, earlier. Of course our Navy and Revenue Cutter Service were still causing the king to lose sleep over lost revenue from sunk or captured British merchant shipping, but those losses had little effect on British policy, and failed absolutely to shake Britain’s control of the sea, or its blockade of our entire entire East Coast.
Americans in general were growing tired of the futile warfare against a foe they couldn’t hope to defeat in a war at sea; the Brits were weary of fighting us, while also trying to deal with Europe’s “Hitler” of the time, Napoleon Bonaparte. At last, on Dec. 24, 1814, Britain and the U.S. signed a peace treaty in Belgium, restoring the pre-war peace. The U.S. gained nothing of its avowed pre-war aims, though popular legends soon considered stalemate and defeat as a widely accepted illusion of victory. Circumstance (not planning) contributed to the process.
The series of late victories on the Great Lakes (and Lake Champlain) contributed, but the biggest contributor was Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans. There he fought (and destroyed) a force of soldiers fresh from victory in Spain and France under Lord Wellington, but fighting now under Wellington’s brother-in-law, Ned Pakenham. Needless to say, Pakenham was not not cut from the same cloth as his brother-in-law. Jackson soundly trounced the rich cream of the Royal Army and drove them into the sea, killing thousands, wounding thousands more.
Poor Ned Pakenham died there, along with thousands of his poorly led soldiers. Several things the war accomplished include the killing of Tecumseh and pacification of the Great Lakes region; and Jackson’s crushing of the Creek Indian Confederacy in 1814. It also ended charades like ‘paper’ blockades and impressment of American sailors by Brits, French, and anyone else with a mind to make trouble, and led directly forward to the acquisition of Florida in 1819.
By the way, ‘Old’ Constitution is the oldest warship still under commission in the world. Lord Nelson’s last ship, HMS Victory, berthed in the Thames and set in concrete, is older, but not in commission, nor sailable. Constitution, following current repairs and rebuilding, will, I’ve heard, be able to move under sail. Or so they say. I rode in her on the annual turnaround a long, long, time ago, when a tug pulled, and very carefully nudged her,. She flew when she was a youngster, and was crewed by seamen as tough as they came. One of her modern day captains wrote her whole biography, it’s published by the Naval Institute Press Early 1980’s or late 1970’s.
Back soon enough, me Hearties!
The best short history of the War of 1812 I ever read. We have hundreds of side stories that fill libraries, but this captures the story well in a few words. The War of 1812 had three large land engagements with the Brits: we won one, one was a draw and we lost one.
The British could not believe the backward Americans could build ships of such quality and that the American sailors could crew them so skillfully. We tend to forget that the United States was a third-world small country until well into the 1900s.