Patriotic Fire Page 5

  By the following spring, after a wretched term in winter quarters during which many soldiers froze to death or died of disease, Wilkinson had pulled himself together enough for another go at it, though without the services of Hampton, who still refused to have anything to do with him. This time Wilkinson took 4,000 of his men toward Montreal, but as soon as they had cleared Lake Champlain and crossed over into Canada they encountered a small, squat blockhouse with fewer than 200 British soldiers inside. Wilkinson besieged it, but when the small cannons he brought up failed to dent the little fort’s stone walls, he reversed tracks and marched his army back to the United States, where he was relieved of command, this time for good.

  There was, however, one military front upon which the United States had achieved success thus far in the war. This was at sea, which is almost astonishing since the British navy could count on one thousand ships in its war fleet while the pitiful American navy could muster only seven frigates, a handful of sloops of war, and a few gunboats. The problem for the British was that most of their navy was tied up fighting Napoleon’s ships, blockading the French coast, or attacking French-held colonies in the Caribbean. Even so, the British navy had a force in North American waters more than twice the size of the U.S. fleet. It is all the more remarkable that this inferior collection of American naval ships not only battled the great British navy to a standstill but, in doing so, their heroics produced a number of historically celebrated slogans and mottoes, such as “Don’t give up the ship,” which even today easily roll off the tongues of Americans.

  In the closing months of the previous year, the few American frigates gave a very good account of themselves against the British navy. Frigates, though not nearly as large as ships of the line, were nevertheless formidible warships. Fairly typical of an American frigate of the day was the Constitution, a 204-foot-long, oak-sided three-master built in 1798. She could do more than thirteen knots (about fifteen miles per hour) under a full acre of sail, and at that rate travel about 350 miles in a twenty-four-hour period, providing the winds were perfect (which they usually weren’t). The Constitution carried a crew of 450, including 50 marines and 30 “cabin boys,” some as young as nine, who fought too.

  In battle, the marines manned the “fighting tops”—wooden shooting platforms at various levels up the masts—from where they could bring a murderous rifle fire down on an enemy in close quarters. Constitution was armed with thirty-two twenty-four-pounder long guns with an effective range of twelve hundred yards, nearly three-quarters of a mile (most cannon in those days were identified by the weight of their projectile), twenty thirty-two-pounder short guns (with a range of four hundred yards), and two twenty-four-pounder “bow chasers” with a range of a thousand yards. She was not equipped with stern guns, on the assumption that she was there to fight, not to run.

  On August 19, 1812, the Constitution encountered the British frigate HMS Guerrière two days out of Boston, and a sea fight ensued. Captained by Isaac Hull (nephew of the odious army general William Hull), Constitution opened fire first with a double-shotted broadside that seemed to cause Guerrière to leap out of the water. Within thirty minutes the British ship was dismasted, her hull torn to pieces, and many of her crew dead or dying. Being without masts from which to strike her colors, she fired a gun to leeward (recognized as a sign of maritime surrender), and, after removing the remainder of her crew, the sailors aboard Constitution watched Guerrière slip slowly beneath the waves.

  So sturdy was the oak from which Constitution was planked that at one point during the battle a sailor watched a solid shot literally bounce off the ship, and exclaimed, “Her sides are made of iron!” The name stuck, and not long afterward Constitution, now nicknamed “Old Ironsides,” chased down another British frigate, Java, and gave her the same treatment.* 10

  Then, on the morning of October 12, the American frigate United States was spotted in the mid-Atlantic by the British frigate Macedonian, which immediately moved in for a fight. The United States—captained by Stephen Decatur, one of America’s foremost naval heroes—obliged. What the captain of Macedonian didn’t realize was that he was outgunned by the United States (fifty-four guns to forty-nine) and that the Americans were expert gunners, a fact he quickly learned, to his regret. Decatur luffed into the wind to slow the ship and unleashed a series of broadsides that cut away Macedonian’s rigging and much of her mastage.

  More than a hundred solid shots penetrated the Britisher’s hull and more than a hundred sailors were killed or wounded—nearly a third of her crew. Macedonian struck her colors barely an hour and a half after the fight had begun and was taken as an American prize. A year and a half later, while conducting treaty negotiations, Decatur authored one of the aforementioned famous slogans that have found their way into the American lexicon: “My country, right or wrong.”* 11

  War at sea was not always so successful for the Americans, though. On the first day of June 1813, Captain John Lawrence was in Boston Harbor trying to refit and reman the Chesapeake, the same ill-fated American frigate that had been attacked by the British off the Virginia coast some six years earlier in an attempt to impress crewmen, an incident that contributed significantly to the outbreak of war.

  Outside the harbor cruised Shannon, a thirty-eight-gun frigate; spying Chesapeake’s masts, she sent ashore a boat carrying a challenge to battle. Lawrence was at a definite disadvantage, since his crew was almost entirely without experience and included a large number of Portuguese of dubious commitment who spoke no English. Nevertheless, he ordered them to make sail and man the guns.

  Just before six p.m. the two ships closed for battle. They were about evenly matched in armament, but the British ship had a far better trained crew. The cannon fire that tore into both vessels produced frightful effects. Theodore Roosevelt, an admired naval historian, described the action this way: “Chesapeake’s broadsides were doing great damage, but she herself was suffering even more than her foe; the men in the Shannon’s tops could hardly see the deck of the American frigate through the cloud of splinters, hammocks, and other wreck that was flying across it, [but] man after man was killed at the wheel; the fourth lieutenant, the master, and the boatswain were slain.”

  After only fifteen minutes the two ships were so close that Shannon’s captain ordered grappling hooks thrown across and told his crew to prepare for boarding. At this unpleasant prospect, many of Chesapeake’s green sailors “became disheartened” and ran belowdecks. As this was happening, Captain Lawrence, who had made himself conspicuous by standing on the quarterdeck in full-dress uniform, was fatally shot by one of the British marines in Shannon’s fighting tops. Lawrence fell to the deck crying, “Don’t give up the ship!”—another of the memorable exclamations from the War of 1812 that soon found a permanent home in the language.

  The fighting from then on was at close quarters and extremely savage—Chesapeake’s chaplain had his arm nearly severed by a blow from “a broad Toledo blade” wielded by Shannon’s captain—but soon it was over and the British victorious. One hundred and forty-eight Americans had been killed or wounded, and the Chesapeake was claimed as a British prize and taken to Nova Scotia.

  Nevertheless, the Americans by this point were not just holding their own against the British in naval actions, they were actually ahead. Yet the strong presence of the British navy on the Great Lakes continued to hamper American operations on the Northern frontier, since the most efficient way to move men, ordnance, and matériel was by water, which the British could do with impunity, while the Americans could not. It was thus determined by the War Department to attempt to rectify the situation.

  To that end, a twenty-seven-year-old naval officer, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry,* 12 was ordered in mid-1813 to the shores of Lake Erie, where five American warships were in the process of being built: two twenty-gun brigantines and three smaller two-gun schooners.* 13 Perry immediately conducted a surprise raid on a British-held harbor at the westward end of the lake, which contained two of
His Majesty’s brigantines, and he captured both; although one ran aground and had to be destroyed, the other was joined to the growing American fleet. Perry also was able to purchase several merchant craft, which he armed and manned for warfare, bringing his squadron to a total of nine ships of one description or another. Then, on September 10, 1813, Perry sallied out of Presque Isle (now the harbor of Erie, Pennsylvania) in hopes of doing battle with the six warships of the British Lake Erie fleet.

  His hopes were quickly fulfilled, though not without some trepidations. Like Lawrence on the Chesapeake, Perry suffered from a critical lack of trained seamen. Fortunately, the army commander in the area, General William Henry Harrison,* 14 scoured the ranks of his soldiers for experienced seamen, cannoneers, and marksmen and sent them to Perry with the foresight that if Perry and his navy could rid Lake Erie of the British, then his (Harrison’s) own job would be that much easier.

  Under sail since dawn, Perry finally spied the British squadron on the western end of the lake just before noon, and the two adversaries began to close. Perry had the wind to his back, giving him a tactical advantage, and, as well, he could throw nearly a third more metal. The battle was fierce and ardent, but after two hours Perry’s flagship, Lawrence, had suffered some 80 percent casualties out of a crew of 136 and was turning into a wreck. Instead of striking colors, however, Perry had himself rowed over to the brig Niagara, where he continued the fight. Soon the heavier American firepower began to tell. By three p.m., four of the British ships struck colors, their commanders either killed or wounded, and two others that tried to escape were seized and captured. According to historian Hickey, “When the victors boarded the Detroit they found a pet bear lapping up blood on the decks and two Indians hiding in the hold.”

  Temporarily, at least, Perry’s victory became a restorative tonic for an American public presently accustomed to bitter and disappointing news. As a military objective it was a brilliant success, since the British had been driven from Lake Erie altogether. Once again a significant literary sidelight occurred when Perry’s communiqué to Harrison was published: “We have met the enemy and he is ours.”* 15

  Three

  In June 1812, just a few days after the declaration of war, Andrew Jackson, major general of Tennessee militia, dispatched from the Hermitage, his magnificent home in Nashville, a letter to President Madison offering to transport his 2,500-man division of Tennessee infantry on an immediate invasion of British Canada with the intention of conquering Quebec “in ninety days.”

  The offer was accepted by Secretary of War Armstrong, but orders never arrived. As the months passed, Jackson became infuriated that commanders such as Wilkinson and Dearborn—whom he rightly considered incompetent—were being tapped to lead campaigns up north while he languished in Tennessee with a full division of trained militia eager to get into the fight. Soon Jackson was able to conclude that he’d become persona non grata at the War Department as the result of stepping on too many toes, a habit long since perfected and honed. Still, the fiery militia general gnashed his teeth at Washington’s inaction, because it is doubtful that anyone in America loathed the English more than Andrew Jackson, and not without good cause; he was perfectly ripe for hating.

  Like the new nation in which he lived, Jackson was suspended between a difficult past and an uncertain future. He had no formal military training, but as a leader of military men he had few peers; he was smart, honest, brave as a lion, and, like the lion, he could be a cold-blooded killer.

  Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, in the scrubby Waxhaw District of eastern South Carolina,* 16 a child of Scots-Irish immigrants who had come to America two years earlier. Andrew’s father died only a few days before his new son’s birth, after “straining himself” lifting a log, and now Andrew’s mother abandoned the farm, which the Jacksons had hoped would provide their living and fortune, and moved with the baby and his two siblings to a relative’s house nearby, where she took up duties as a housekeeper and babysitter.

  To say that young Andrew grew up precocious would understate the case. He was more like a terror—fighting, swearing, gambling, smoking, and drinking, traits that would stay with him a lifetime—dashing the fond hopes of his mother that he would one day become a Presbyterian minister. Yet he was also smart and received a fair education, though he never quite mastered the skills of spelling and grammar.

  By the time Andrew was thirteen the American Revolution had swept into the Upper Carolinas, spearheaded by the cruel and remorseless Scottish cavalryman Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his infamous green-coated dragoons, who ruthlessly raised the level of violence and brutality: hanging, burning, raping, and looting, and, in the process, touching off a civil war between patriots and Tories of the region that pitted neighbor against neighbor.

  Andrew’s older brother Hugh died fighting the British at the Battle of Stono Ferry in 1779, and the following year the two remaining Jackson boys, Robert, sixteen, and Andrew, thirteen, signed up to fight with the cavalry of Colonel William Davie. By then the fighting in the Carolinas had turned so ferocious that no quarter was generally given by either side and massacres were commonplace. Because of his age and riding prowess, young Andrew was made a courier, but he certainly saw his share of war and developed a lifelong loathing of the British practice of it.

  The following year both boys were captured by a British raiding party. When Andrew refused an “imperious” order to clean a British officer’s boots, the man struck him with his saber, slashing him savagely on his head and hand, leaving scars, both physical and mental, for the rest of his life. The raiders then looted the house, raped the women, and burned the place down, barn and all. Andrew and Robert were thrown into a filthy, bedless British prison in Camden and put on a diet of bread and water; a Tory stole Andrew’s pistol, shoes, coat, and hat, and both boys contracted smallpox, a scourge that had already wreaked havoc across the nation.

  Plucky Elizabeth Jackson, hearing of her boys’ capture, rode into Camden and persuaded the British commander to include the two youngsters in an exchange of prisoners that was being negotiated. Robert was so weak from disease that he had to be strapped on a horse, while Andrew, barefoot, hatless, and coatless in the rain, walked the forty miles it took to get home. Robert died two days later, and it looked as though Andrew, too, was doomed, but nursed by his mother he pulled through.

  Several months later, when Andrew seemed to be on the road to recovery, Elizabeth journeyed to Charleston to minister to her two nephews, who were ill aboard British prison ships in Charleston Harbor. At their parting, his mother gave young Andrew some advice: “Make friends by being honest and keep them by being steadfast. Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue for slander—settle them cases yourself!”

  These words, like his scars, remained hard and dear to Andrew Jackson all his life, for it wasn’t long before he learned that his mother had died of cholera contracted aboard the prison ships. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Charleston, leaving him little to remember her by except those parting words and the pitiable bundle of her belongings that had arrived along with word of her death. Andrew Jackson, at the age of fifteen, was alone in the world—as he vividly remembered it, an orphan of the British war.

  For the next three years, by all accounts, Jackson lived a dissolute life with no one to guide him or take care of him. He became a sort of glorified Huckleberry Finn, gambling, smoking, drinking, and, in his case, racing fine thoroughbred horses acquired with a small inheritance that his grandfather in Ireland had left him. Two years after the war ended, Jackson decided he wanted to be a lawyer and “read” law with a prominent attorney in Salisbury, North Carolina, where he lived above a tavern and, according to local residents, merrily dissipated himself, as the saying goes, with wine, women, and song.

  Despite all this, in 1787 Jackson, now twenty, received his license to practice law. He had grown into a man just short of handsome, above six feet tall, lean and somewhat gaunt with deep, piercing,
steel-blue eyes and a great shock of reddish-brown hair on his forehead. Perceptively, Jackson concluded that the Tennessee territory on the western side of the Alleghenies was a smart place to start a legal practice. Tennessee was still largely Indian land,* 17 settled by Americans just eighteen years earlier—and then by just one person, a man named William Bean. But raw new territories often provided spectacular opportunities for men learned in law, since there were always boundary disputes and property sales to be settled, wills and deeds to be drawn up, even the territorial laws themselves had to be written—all this in addition to the defense or prosecution of the abnormally large number of killers, thieves, and other miscreants who tended to inhabit such wildernesses.

  Within a year Jackson was appointed to the post of territorial prosecutor and within another he was made United States attorney general for the territory. He settled in a dingy little hamlet consisting of about fifty primitive log houses on the Cumberland River at what is now the city of Nashville.

  Tennessee was where Jackson fought his first duel, also within a year of his arrival,* 18 and within yet another he met and married his wife, twenty-two-year-old Rachel Robards. The circumstances of this last were to cause Jackson much trouble (and dueling) throughout his life, because both he and Rachel had relied on reports from Kentucky—where her first husband had gone after he left her—that a divorce had been granted there. When that news proved to be untrue, occasionally rude comments were circulated by the ambitious Jackson’s growing number of detractors to the effect that he was an adulterer and she a bigamist, and Jackson spent no small amount of time challenging any and all of these assertions.