Quarterdeck and Bridge

by John K. Mahon

U.S. NAVAL INTITUTE COLLECTION

OLIVER HAZARD PERRY’S SHORT LIFE IS ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY A NAVAL one. He came into the world with navy in his blood. His father, Christopher Raymond, was in naval combat during the American Revolution and in British prisons for long stretches; when the Navy Department was created in 1798, he was commissioned captain. Oliver, born 20 August 1785, was the oldest of four sons and three daughters. All of the sons became officers in the Navy, and two of the daughters married naval officers.¹ Oliver’s brother Matthew Calbraith, junior to him by nine years, became famous for commanding the U.S. expeditionary squadron during the Mexican War and for opening Japan to American trade.

In 1799, fourteen-year-old Oliver went on board the U.S. frigate General Greene (of twenty-eight guns) as a midshipman, under his father’s command. Thereafter, he remained in the service until his premature death at age thirty-five. From the start, he learned his profession well; both afloat and ashore, he studied navigation, seamanship, and mathematics, and read Hackluyt. He worked with the guns too and became as fine an ordnance officer as there was in the service.

Apart from professional manuals, he read Shakespeare and Montaigne. He became an accomplished flutist, horseback rider, and fencer. The distinguished officers under whom he served contributed to his development: his father, Edward Preble, James Barron, Charles Morris, and, above all, John Rodgers. These and other senior officers were impressed with young Perry and took pains to advance his career. But, he owed more to diligence and to the consequent mastery of skills for his rise in the profession than to other contributants.² When he became a captain, he closely supervised the education of the young midshipmen under his command.

Perry rose rapidly in the young Navy. He was commissioned lieutenant at age seventeen while serving in the Mediterranean squadron; took command of the schooner Nautilus (with twelve guns) when he was twenty years old; and was chosen to direct the building of seventeen of Jefferson’s gunboats two years later. Each of the gunboats was to be armed with a long twenty-four-pound gun and manned by thirty persons.3 In 1809 he took command of the schooner Revenge (with twelve guns). But that ship came near to interrupting his upward mobility when, on 2 February 1811, she ran aground in a heavy fog and broke up on the rocks off Newport, Rhode Island. Perry was suspended from command pending a hearing on this loss. The panelists of the inquiry charged the grounding to the pilot, who was supposed to know the coastal waters, and exonerated Perry; but the loss of a ship marred his record nonetheless.⁴

Throughout the Revenge affair Perry seems to have tried to spare the feelings and protect the reputation of his second in command, Lieutenant Jacob Hite, notwithstanding that he had suspended Hite from duty for reasons that are not known. In spite of Perry’s protection, the panelists decided that Hite’s performance during the wreck was discreditable, and they broke him to midshipman and suspended him from active duty.⁵ This episode reveals a tendency in Perry to shelter subordinates from their just deserts. One who was thus sheltered plagued the later years of Perry’s life and did his best to destroy his superior’s image in history.

The same day that President James Madison proclaimed a state of war against Great Britain, 18 June 1812, the Secretary of the Navy directed Perry to take command of the gunboats that he had helped to build at Newport. Perry instituted a rigorous training, putting the gunboats and their crews through fleetlike maneuvers and engaging them in sham battles.⁶ But in time of war, this was not enough; like his peers, Perry needed the glory and honor that were to be attained only in combat. Accordingly, he steadily sought assignment to a seagoing fighting ship and, as steadily, failed to receive it. Finally, therefore, he requested transfer to the Great Lakes theater where John Rodgers assured him that, saltwater or not, there would be brisk fighting.⁷

On 8 February 1813, the Secretary of the Navy ordered Master Commandant Perry to proceed with 150 of his best gunboat sailors to report to Captain Isaac Chauncey, commander of the Great Lakes. Eager to see action, Perry lost no time in carrying out this directive.⁸ On 28 February, only twenty days later, he met his new commanding officer, not on the Great Lakes but in Albany, New York. Chauncey—who was to be a central character in the events that placed Perry prominently in American history—personified one strain in the officer corps, Perry the opposite. Chauncey was an administrator, Perry an operational commander. Chauncey, the manager, ordered Perry, the combat officer, to travel westward with some of his Rhode Island men to Presque Isle on the south shore of Lake Erie, and there to build a naval squadron with which to wrest control of the lake from the British, who, at that time, dominated it. In carrying out this gigantic task, Perry was able to draw on his experience in building the Jefferson gunboats. After building the squadron, it was his task to become supreme on the lake, two hundred miles long and sixty miles wide, and over both tips of the Ontario Peninsula.9

Perry traveled in the bitter cold, partly by sled on the frozen lake, to reach Presque Isle on 27 March. The spot was one of natural beauty, with a fine but virtually undefended harbor. The garrison was insignificant, having but one cannon. As for building materials, the wood stood in the forest: cedar, black oak, white oak, chestnut, and pine for the decks. Nonwood materials had to come from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 130 miles away, or Philadelphia, farther yet, via a series of small rivers and creeks. With the aid of army ordnance at Pittsburgh, Perry collected a few artillery pieces and some essential building materials. Authorities canvassed homes in the town for iron that could be put to naval use. At this time, as at all others, Perry doggedly held to his duty, and the building went forward.

Manpower was even scarcer than materials. A few blacksmiths could be drawn from the local militia, but more were needed and had to be trained as they worked. “Give me men, Sir,” Perry wrote to Chauncey, “and I will acquire both for you and myself glory and honor . . . or perish in the attempt.”¹⁰ Chauncey, who was hardpressed to hold his own against Sir James Lucas Yeo on Lake Ontario, sent small detachments but often retained the best sailors for his own command. Perry suspected as much, and, desperate as he was for reinforcements, he complained about one of the detachments sent to him. Had the Commodore ever seen these men? Chauncey, it happened, had had to curb his own operations to make that particular shipment and replied sharply. Perry was offended by the tone of the response and wrote to the Secretary of the Navy to request a transfer. “I cannot serve,” he said, “under an officer who has been so totally regardless of my feelings.”¹¹

Here, Perry displayed the hypersensitivity common to the officer corps. Feelings were deep within these men, and they were touchy on matters of honor, glory, and pride. Chauncey became conciliatory, the Secretary denied the transfer request, and Perry characteristically stood to his duty. Although he continued to believe that his crews were composed of Chauncey’s rejects, he did his best with them.¹²

Such supplies as reached Presque Isle came at prices so high that the Secretary often required Perry to justify them. For example, it cost a thousand dollars to ship one cannon from Albany to the lake region; this was the price of five hundred acres of good land around Pittsburgh. A barrel of flour came at one hundred dollars. Small wonder that the Secretary demanded to know why Perry requisitioned expensive lead for ballast when big heavy stones lay about free of charge. Perry made the rational and plausible response that the runs (i.e., the shape of his ship’s underbodies) were such that sufficient stones could not be placed in them, that pig iron, the usual ballast material, was not available; and that the lead he purchased for ballast, at any time, could be sold for the price that he had paid for it and the money returned to the treasury.13

With the advent of spring Perry surveyed his resources for the upcoming campaign season. His Lake Erie command included, in addition to the vessels he was building, five small craft at Black Rock on the Niagara River. The problem lay in uniting his squadron. The Black Rock ships were immobilized by the guns at Fort Erie on the Canadian side of the Niagara, and it would be difficult to get them out of the river and up the eighty miles to Presque Isle because the British dominated the lake. In addition, the harbor at Presque Isle was blocked by a bar at its mouth. Even at times of high water, no more than seven feet of water passed over it; at other times, as little as four. The two brigs building there would draw nine feet. Jesse D. Elliott, soon to loom large in Perry’s life, had told his supervisors that the place was unsuitable for the American base on Lake Erie because of the bar. Perry, who did not create the situation, accepted it as part of what he must overcome to do his duty and earn honor and glory.¹⁴

The opportunity to free the vessels at Black Rock came late in May 1813. Chauncey, for the Navy, and General Henry Dearborn, for the Army, agreed to assault Fort George, which sat at the northern end of the Niagara River. Chauncey summoned Perry to take part and turned the naval action ashore over to him. Perry had scant respect for the Army but found himself able to work well with Colonel Winfield Scott, to whom Dearborn had delegated the Army’s role. Perry planned the river crossing and personally led the landing party that established the beachhead. The joint American force captured Fort George on 27 May, whereupon the British evacuated Fort Erie at the other end of the Niagara without a fight.

Now the Black Rock ships could emerge onto Lake Erie, but only after a herculean effort in which sailors yoked up with oxen and two hundred soldiers sent by General Dearborn dragged them against the swift current of the river as it rushed toward Niagara Falls. By 12 June, the vessels were on the lake and hugging the south shore for the eighty miles to Presque Isle in order to elude the British.¹⁵

Why had the enemy not wiped out Perry’s precarious base when it was virtually defenseless? One part of the answer is that the British, like the Americans, were at the tip of their line of communications; supplies had to come up the Saint Lawrence, go through Lake Ontario, and only then reach Erie. Perforce, the end-of-the-line forces were chronically short of everything they needed. Added to this difficulty was another, the complicated layers of command interposed between a commander on Erie and supplies, men, and strategy.

Sir John Borlase Warren, British naval commander in North America, sent Captain Robert Heriot Barclay, a veteran who had lost an arm at Trafalgar, to the Great Lakes in February 1813, but some of his superiors retained Barclay on Lake Ontario too long. Finally he was told to go to Erie and take charge, but it was 3 June before, with the utmost effort, he could reach Amherstburg. There, he joined the ships of the British squadron and took to the lake at once to try to intercept the Black Rock vessels. Because the vessels were on the lake on 12 June, he had scant time for preparations.

In any case, Perry got them inside the Presque Isle bar on 19 and 20 June. Barclay reported that the Americans had slipped by him in heavy fog. He knew now that added forces were necessary to attack Presque Isle, and he pleaded for them to every commander, army and naval, who might help. His requests ricocheted around among Brigadier John Vincent, Governor General George Prevost, Brigadier Henry Procter, Major General Francis DeRottenburg, and Sir James Yeo, but none of them could find soldiers or sailors to wipe out Perry’s menacing establishment.16 Perry, who would have resisted, however futilely, any attack, never stopped putting together an American squadron to contest for the control of Lake Erie.

There is an ingredient in martial achievement that—combined with diligence and determination in the commander—must be present: luck. Perry was lucky that the British did not strike him when he was all but defenseless. Nor did luck desert him later.

By 10 July, Perry’s squadron was ready, except for a shortage of sailors, to cross the bar. His twin brigs were 141 feet long by 30 feet wide, with two masts. Each mounted twenty guns, two of them long, the rest carronades, shorter in range but able to throw heavier projectiles. Perry knew that Barclay was hurrying to finish one ship equal to one of his brigs and that whoever got onto the lake first with a superior squadron might dominate it afterward. Sometime in July Perry learned that his closest friend in the Navy, James Lawrence, had been killed on board the Chesapeake in a battle with the frigate Shannon on 12 July. Consequently, Perry named the brig he had chosen as his flagship the Lawrence, and he saw to the sewing of a battle flag with Lawrence’s last words worked onto it: “Don’t Give Up the Ship!” Her twin brig received the name Niagara.

Noah Brown, who had supervised building the two brigs, said they were good for one battle, no more. Constructed as they were of green wood, a musket ball could penetrate their two inches of planking.¹⁷

It was a mile from deep water in the harbor to deep water in the lake. The two brigs would have to be mounted on “camels” to pass over the bar and the shoal water beyond it. The camels would be filled with water in the harbor and pumped dry at the bar, at which time they would lift the vessels high enough to pass over. Because of their weight, the guns would have to be dismounted; thus, while in transit, the vessels would be utterly helpless. In spite of this vulnerability, and in spite of being short about 250 men, Perry decided that he must go over. He positioned the dismounted guns and the light craft to give as much defense to the operation as was possible and started the movement on Sunday, 1 August. The country people from far and near came to watch, and the local militia pitched in to help with the heavy hauling. By Monday the five Black Rock vessels were over and posted defensively.

On 4 August, the Lawrence was afloat on the lake, but the Niagara was stuck in the shoals. At that critical moment, Barclay’s squadron—minus his big ship, which was not yet finished—appeared. Perry now demonstrated the audacity that marked him as a combat commander by sending the Ariel and the Scorpion out to sail straight at the foe as they fired their long twenty-four-pounders. Thinking he saw a formidable squadron over the bar, Barclay failed to realize the Americans’ vulnerability and sailed back toward Amherstburg, not to emerge again until his flagship, Detroit, was able to join.

For his part, Perry remounted the armament on his big ships and prepared them to cruise. His audacity, supported by luck, had brought him success. Barclay had always asserted that he could prevent Perry’s crossing the Presque Isle bar.18

During the second week of August 1813, Master Commandant Jesse D. Elliott reported to Perry. He brought with him about a hundred men and the letter from Chauncey that caused Perry to ask for transfer. Perry’s sailing master, William V. Taylor, noted that Elliott detailed the best of the replacements to the Niagara, which he was to command. Taylor protested to Perry, but the latter, showing his tendency to avoid ruffling the feelings of subordinates, let the matter pass.¹⁹

Perry now pointed his squadron up the lake toward the British base, 150 miles away. Illness appeared to be draining away his luck. Half of his crews were down with typhoid or malaria, and he, himself, was too sick to be on deck during the latter part of August. Good fortune returned, however, and he resumed active control on 1 September.²⁰

As Perry’s place on the roster of American military immortals depends on one battle, the details of that fight bearing on his leadership are here essential. Major General William Henry Harrison, commander of the land forces across the lake from Amherstburg, had been waiting many months for American domination of Erie so that he could cross and invade Upper Canada. It was grievous to Perry to have to tell Harrison from time to time that he must wait longer. Now he informed the general that a lack of manpower held him up. Harrison offered soldiers, and Perry accepted those who could be of help. The Secretary of the Navy rebuked Perry mildly for informing an army officer of his deficiencies. Such shortcomings, he said, ought to be kept within the naval service.²¹

Perry and Harrison together reconnoitered the upper lake and selected South Bass Island as the staging point for action against the British. Thirty-five miles from the enemy’s base, the island has a good harbor—later designated Put-in-Bay—and it was a logical place to move the army from the American mainland if and when it could invade.22 While Perry positioned his squadron to ensure that there would be a climactic battle, his superior, Captain Chauncey, was maneuvering on Lake Ontario in such a way as to virtually ensure that there would be no battle. For ten weeks or so, he and Sir James Yeo engaged in Virginia-reel-like action, falling back, and advancing, over and over. Neither commander was willing to bring on the climactic battle on the lake. Chauncey, for example, would never risk his fast ships to overtake the enemy while trusting the laggards to catch up in time to turn the tide. Instead he caused the swift ones to take the dullards in tow.²³

Developments on the British side of Lake Erie were pushing toward the showdown that Perry sought. Supplies had piled up at Long Point that were desperately needed at the head of the lake, 150 miles away. They could not be transported by land, only via the lake. Barclay launched the Detroit, without stores or crew, on 20 July, and armed her with nineteen long guns of four different calibers and two howitzers removed from the forts. Filling out his crews with men from the foot regiments, he prepared for combat.

Perry knew in general terms of Barclay’s preparations and took pains to avoid being taken by surprise. Should Barclay attack his squadron at anchor, the ships should weigh anchor and form a line with the Lawrence in the lead. Should there not be time for such a maneuver, the ships should cut their cables and make sail behind the leewardmost vessel. Passwords were devised to avoid confusion during darkness. Twice Perry reconnoitered Barclay’s fleet at Fort Malden and surveyed the coast for suitable places to land Harrison’s army.

By the beginning of September, Barclay had to act. Perry’s anchorage in the Bass Islands virtually blockaded the British at Malden and cut their supply lines from the east. With twenty thousand troops and Indian allies to feed, Barclay’s stores ran low, and he was forced to put his men on reduced rations. On 6 September, he informed his commanders that he was prepared to leave his base and fight. He knew that his squadron was inferior but not to what degree, and his only alternative was to abandon his ships and withdraw overland. The obvious choice was to fight.

The balance of forces slightly favored the Americans:²⁴

Barclay’s advantage lay in his superiority in long guns, but Perry knew this and planned to bring his squadron into close action rapidly, where his superior weight of broadside would count. Thus, he directed each ship captain to close with the opposite of his class and engage at close range. The Lawrence, Perry commanding, would duel the other flagship, the Detroit, and the Niagara, Jesse Elliott commanding, would fight the Queen Charlotte.25

American lookouts sighted the British squadron nine miles west of Put-in-Bay and nine miles from the U.S. mainland. The direction of the wind made it difficult for Perry to leave harbor, but so determined was he to engage that he ordered the line to move anyway, working from the lee side. He made the rounds of the gun crews, and his visit strengthened their determination. Forty-seven of his guns were manned by Rhode Islanders, for whom he had special encouragements. Next he ran up the banner, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” and urged the sailors to follow the motto; they responded with a great shout.

Then the Perry luck reasserted itself, as the wind swung around ninety degrees to give him the weather gauge. His squadron straightaway fanned down upon the enemy at an angle of about twenty-five degrees in order to get within carronade range the fastest way. The oblique approach subjected the Lawrence, in the lead, to heavy fire before she could bring her own broadsides to bear. Moreover, Barclay, who had decided that his best tactic was to knock out the American flagship, concentrated thirty-five of his sixty-three guns on the Lawrence. Beginning at a range of one and a half miles, the British long guns began to take effect. Because, for some reason, Elliott did not bring up the Niagara to close, the Queen Charlotte could also concentrate on the Lawrence.

In spite of the punishment, Perry got his vessel to within three hundred yards of the Detroit and pounded away at her. For two and a half hours the American flagship absorbed as severe a shelling as any ship ever has. By 1:30 P.M. the Lawrence was dead in the water, but still fighting. Thirty minutes later, only 19 of her crew of 142 men were fit for duty. In the midst of the maelstrom, however, the Perry luck was holding. Dressed as a common sailor in order to deceive marksmen, Perry stood at his post, where he was slightly wounded once, while men fell all around him and spattered him with their blood and brains.²⁶

Elliott finally brought the Niagara forward, but he kept the Caledonia, which had closely supported Perry throughout the battle, and the shattered Lawrence between his ship and the enemy broadsides. When the Niagara was about half a mile from the flagship, Perry decided to shift to her, perfectly unharmed as she was. He boarded the gig, providentially intact, and with five sailors and his brother Alexander, made for the Niagara. Once the British saw the movement, they opened fire on the little boat, but, in fifteen minutes, Perry was across the bullet-churned water and on board his new flagship. Although there were precedents for this transit in the English-Dutch wars, it was rare enough to be astonishing. Numerous pictures of it have been painted by artists who were not there, more than one of which depicts Perry standing upright in full-dress uniform with his sword pointed straight out like a lance. Perry, who knew better than to posture in this critical moment, was, of course, still in common sailor’s garb, and sitting because the rowers begged him to sit.27

It can never be known for sure what passed between the two master commandants when Perry came on board. There are several versions of the conversation, all of them suspect because of bias.²⁸ It is certain, however, what took place next. Elliott got into a small boat and was rowed to the lesser warships to bring them into closer action. His passage, like Perry’s, was hazardous. Perry curbed the speed of the Niagara, which seemed to him about to run out of the battle, and turned into what was left of the British line so as to cross the “T” on both broadsides. The Niagara raked the vessels to her left and right from stem to stern. At three o’clock, fifteen minutes after Perry’s transit, the Detroit struck her colors, and the other British ships soon did the same. Here, for the first time in history, a full British squadron was surrendered.²⁹

That great historian Henry Adams said of the result, “More than any other battle of the time (this) was won by the courage and obstinacy of one man.”³⁰ Perry reported his victory in simple, powerful words. To the Secretary he wrote, “It has pleased the almighty to give the arms of the United States a signal victory over our enemies on this Lake . . .”; and to General Harrison, “We have met the enemy and they are ours, two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.”³¹

This tiny action, involving fifteen vessels, 117 guns, and about one thousand men, ranks as one of the decisive battles in American history when one considers the results. By gaining control of Lake Erie, and with it the waterways between Upper Canada and Michigan, it transferred the initiative to the Americans. The British found their position in Michigan and Ohio untenable; they were forced to withdraw, and the Northwest was preserved for the United States. William Henry Harrison was now able to invade Upper Canada. Beginning on 20 September, Perry transported Harrison’s troops to Canada. Thereafter, his squadron kept the invading army supplied, while Perry himself joined the general and, on 5 October 1813, was in the forefront of the Battle of the Thames, which broke the fighting power of the British west of the Niagara River.³²

Only ten days after his great achievement, Perry requested to be relieved from the Erie command. Why he did so is not known. He had found it trying to work under Chauncey and, perhaps, to function as Elliott’s superior. Moreover, little honor seemed available while Chauncey continued his combat-free maneuvering on Ontario. In any case, the Navy Department granted his request. On 25 October, he transferred the Erie command to Elliott and began a hero’s progress across the northeastern United States to his home in Newport. Chauncey protested the department’s decision to release Perry because it would make it difficult to hold competent officers in the lake zone. To him, Perry was deserting his post, and, to a degree, he was.33

In reporting the battle, Perry had made a grave mistake. Dissatisfied as he had been with Elliott’s performance, he yet wrote in his official account, “At half past two, the wind springing up, Captain Elliott was enabled to bring his vessel . . . gallantly into close action.” Without adding that he had personally assumed command of the Niagara, Perry went on to say, “In this action, [Elliott] evinced his characteristic bravery and judgment.”³⁴ Later, he acknowledged that it was foolish of him to have written this because it was not true. He explained his lapse thus: “At such a moment, there was not a person in the world whose feeling I would have hurt.”

Almost immediately after the battle, Elliott began to demand more recognition than was in the after-action report. In response, just nine days from the fight, Perry informed Elliott that his conduct had his commander’s “warmest approbation.”³⁵ This distortion of what Perry really believed, in order to spare the feelings and the record of a subordinate, dogged him the rest of his life. Elliott persisted in his demand that the report be changed. Finally, in 1818, he challenged his former commander to a duel.³⁶ By this time Perry no longer cared about the man’s feelings. He replied that he could fight only a gentleman, which Elliott had proved he was not, and that he would file formal charges against him. If the resultant court-martial exonerated him, then, and only then, would there be a duel.

The charges went to the Secretary of the Navy on 10 August 1818, nearly five years after the battle. They stipulated that Elliott had disobeyed his orders; had hung a mile behind the Lawrence; had handled his sails to keep clear of the melee; and through “cowardice, negligence, or disaffection” had not done his utmost to destroy the vessel he had been assigned to attack. The Secretary, not wishing to divide the officer corps on a matter so far in the past, passed the papers along to the President without recommendation. James Monroe, for political reasons, chose to pigeonhole them; so there never was a trial. As a consequence, years after Perry had died, Elliott was asserting that he, not Perry, had really won the battle.³⁷

Elliott’s campaign did not dislodge Perry from his pedestal in American history, nor did it perpetuate Elliott’s own name, but it poisoned relations within the Navy’s officer corps for thirty years. Only the Sampson-Schley controversy at the turn of the twentieth century rivals it for acrimony and longevity. Writers, such as the novelist-historian James Fenimore Cooper and the naval officer-biographer Alexander Mackenzie, were drawn into the fray. More recent historians have preferred to overlook the bitter dispute between the naval hero and the officer who wished to replace him as hero. The one place where Elliott nearly got even was in the distribution of prize money. Congress appropriated $250,000 to distribute among officers and sailors for the capture of the British squadron. At the start, Elliott received $7, 140, the same sum as Perry. Chauncey, who was in overall command on the lake though not present at the battle, received more than either of the participants, his share being $12, 750. Later Congress voted five thousand more for Perry.38

The balance of Perry’s short life is quickly told. In 1814, when the British fleet moved up the Potomac River, Perry, with John Rodgers and David Porter, was sent by the department to delay the British in any way possible. They put naval guns ashore and commanded batteries that harassed the invading ships as they returned down the river.³⁹ Perry was assigned to supervise the completion of the Java, a frigate of forty-four guns, and command her when at sea. The ship was built like a fine piece of cabinetwork, but what Perry did not know was that some of the wood used was substandard. It was 1816 before the Java was ready to sail for the Mediterranean. During that voyage, one of the yards broke, pitching five sailors to their death on the deck and revealing rotten wood.

That year continued to be a bad one for Perry. While serving with the Mediterranean squadron, he made a second serious error; he struck Captain John Heath, the commander of marines on board the Java. Perry reported his violation of regulations to his superiors at once, acknowledging that he had lost control of himself. There was a court of inquiry; the judges censured Heath and gave a light reprimand to Perry. Some of his oldest associates, senior captains, protested that Perry’s sentence was too lenient. To condone striking a junior officer, they said, opened the way to arbitrary, dictatorial conduct by senior commanders. Others of Perry’s peers defended him to the point of demanding that the protesters be dismissed. The sentence stood, and no one was let go.⁴⁰

In the Marine Corps an officer could not allow a blow, whoever struck it, to go unrevenged. Therefore, Heath persisted in demanding satisfaction. Finally, on 19 October 1818, two years after the event, Heath and Perry met in a duel at Weehawken, where Alexander Hamilton had been killed by Aaron Burr in 1804. Like Hamilton, Perry let it be known that he would not fire at all; while he stood with his arms at his side, Heath shot and missed. Perry’s second proposed to Heath that what had occurred ought to satisfy his honor; Heath agreed, and the matter ended there.⁴¹

In Perry’s naval career, very little of historical note had occurred for some time. Then, in 1819, the Secretary of the Navy directed him to sail in the frigate John Adams, accompanied by the schooner Nonsuch, to find the leaders of Venezuela, a new nation freshly created by Simon Bolívar, and negotiate a treaty with them not to molest American merchantmen. To find the Venezuelan government, Perry had to work his way 150 miles or so up the Orinoco River in the Nonsuch because the frigate drew too much water. At the town of Angostura, the captain found a vice president, Francisco Zea, who seemed competent to negotiate, because Bolívar himself, the head of state, was off fighting for independence from Spain in another area. By the time Perry had secured an agreement from Zea and started down the river, it was August, with fearful heat and clouds of insects.

The Navy Department, one supposes, had no way of knowing that to order a voyage into the jungle at that season was the equivalent of issuing a death warrant. Among the swarming insects were mosquitoes, carriers of deadly yellow fever. Perry’s crew was decimated. The captain wrote his reaction to the conditions: “I meet this danger as I do all others, simply because it is my duty; Yet I must own that there is something more appalling in the shape of death approaching in a fever than in the form of a cannon ball.” The Perry luck had finally run out. It was his fate to accept death in the more appalling form: yellow fever killed him at the mouth of the Orinoco River on 23 August 1819, just three days after his thirty-fourth birthday.42

The family he left behind consisted of his widow, three sons, and one daughter. Congress voted Elizabeth Mason Perry four hundred dollars per year through her life and all of the children fifty dollars per year until they were of age. The daughter’s annuity was to run for life if she did not marry. Congress here exceeded its previous provision for dependents, which ended with the life of the veteran himself.⁴³

This concern for Perry’s heirs reflected the commodore’s treatment of others while he was alive. Perry was generally conciliatory and humane, reserved in public but warm with close associates. His best friends in the Navy were James Lawrence and Stephen Decatur, two of its finest officers. Midshipmen who were fortunate enough to serve with him received an excellent professional beginning. Perry opened his library to them, and they remembered his guidance in later life. Other subordinates, including Sailing Master William V. Taylor and Surgeon Usher Parsons, considered him a brave officer; they respected not only his ability as a fighter but also his humanity toward the sick and wounded. Among the latter, Perry’s prisoner, Captain Robert Barclay, who had been terribly wounded, recorded that his captor treated him like a brother.

Perry expected the best from common sailors and got it by visiting them at their battle stations, by appealing to their pride, and by standing under the same hail of bullets that they endured. After the war, while recruiting a crew for the Java, Perry had to turn away good seamen who had flocked to serve with him because he was the sort of hero who reflected credit upon them.

Better than many of his peers, Perry worked effectively with competent army officers. He and Winfield Scott shared in the capture of Fort George, and he and William Henry Harrison cooperated to bring about the final defeat of the British army in Upper Canada.44

Perry is remembered in the Navy, however, not as a hail-fellow-well-met, but for winning one of the decisive battles in American history. In doing so he became a national hero. While the memory of his achievement was fresh, citizens named nineteen towns and nine counties after him. Painters executed a dozen or more heroic portraits of Perry and at least as many canvases of the Battle of Lake Erie, most of them featuring the transit from the Lawrence to the Niagara. A massive monument to him stands on South Bass Island and another, less massive but more artistic, in Newport, Rhode Island, his hometown. A third statue stands in Buffalo, New York. A replica of the Niagara, containing some fragments of the original, is placed on a hillside overlooking the harbor at Erie, Pennsylvania. The U.S. Naval Academy displays the sword Perry wore during the battle and spreads the pennant, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” in Bancroft Hall. During the past half century, seven articles in which Perry is mentioned, some of them featuring him, have been printed in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute.⁴⁵

Part of the Perry legacy is the imbroglio between him and Jesse D. Elliott. This demonstrates to all generations that it never pays to gloss over a poor performance in order to protect the feelings or the record of any person. Too late, Perry himself recognized this. When his relationship with Elliott had deteriorated as far as it could go, he wrote him: “I shall never cease to criminate myself (for giving a favorable report of your conduct) for the sake of screening you from public contempt.”⁴⁶

Perry was not a managerial officer. When caught in an inactive theater, he sought transfer to the combat zone. Once there, he bent all his energy to engage the foe in a climactic battle. In his day, it was still possible to win a campaign, even a war, in a day. He drew on his reserve strength to be ready for the decisive moment; for example, when dragging the ships across the bar at Presque Isle, he went without sleep for three days and three nights. Although he stood throughout the action, he took pains, as noted earlier, to keep from being foolishly conspicuous. Perry was basically a kind man, but in battle he became so preoccupied with the outcome as to be unconscious of the misery about him. He was prepared to lose his life for three intangibles: duty, honor, and glory.

Certainly he was not indifferent to material rewards, yet he would not accept the percentages of the cost of ships built under his supervision, to which he was entitled by regulation. He feared this sort of financial gain might warp his judgment as a fighting officer. It is no small part of his legacy to his profession that he was first and foremost a combat officer.⁴⁷

NOTES

1. John M. Niles, Life of Oliver Hazard Perry, 3d ed. (Hartford, 1821), 16, 17; Richard Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy: Oliver Hazard Perry, Wilderness Commodore (New York, 1978), 1.

2. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 4, 6, 16, 18; Niles, Life of Perry, 23, 25; and Charles J. Dutton, Oliver Hazard Perry (New York, 1935), 17.

3. Dutton, Perry, 24, 28, 41; Niles, Life of Perry, 31, 57, 223; Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 13, 28, 38, 39; and Frederick L. Oliver, “Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry of Newport, Rhode Island,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 80 (July 1954): 778.

4. Dutton, Perry, 24, 28; Alexander S. Mackenzie, The Life of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (New York, 1840), 1:99.

5. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 39ff.

6. Dutton, Perry, 50; and Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 6 vols. (New York, 1887–1889), 4:735.

7. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 54; and Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:122.

8. Secretary of the Navy to Perry, 8 February 1813, Record Group (RG) 45; Letters Sent by the Secretary of the Navy to Officers, National Archives (hereafter cited as Secretary of the Navy Letters).

9. Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:130–33, 170, 171; and Dutton, Perry, 56ff. 63, 73.

10. Quoted in Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 101.

11. Chauncey to Perry, 14 July 1813, RG 45, Letters Received by the Secretary of the Navy: Captains’ Letters, National Archives; Perry to Secretary of the Navy William Jones, as quoted in Alfred Thayer Mahan, Sea Power in Its Relation to the War of 1812, 2 vols. (Boston, 1919), 2:63–66; and Dutton, Perry, 113.

12. Richard J. Cox, “An Eye-Witness Account of the Battle of Lake Erie,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 104 (February 1978): 73.

13. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 64, 66, 67, 113, 114; George D. Emerson, comp., The Perry Victory Centenary (Albany, 1916), 158; and Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:208, 209.

14. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 58; Fletcher Pratt, The Navy (Garden City, N.Y., 1938), 178; Glenn Tucker, Poltroons and Patriots: A Popular Account of the War of 1812, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1954), 1:316; and Barclay to Yeo, 1 June 1813, printed in Richard C. Knopf, trans., Ancedotes of the Lake Erie Area: War of 1812 (Columbus, Ohio, 1957), 17.

15. Mahan, Sea Power, 2:38, 41; Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 85–92, 94; and Chauncey to Secretary of the Navy, 29 May 1813, RG 45, Captains’ Letters.

16. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 94, 95; Barclay’s narrative in Charles O. Paullin, ed., The Battle of Lake Erie: A Collection of Documents (Cleveland, 1918), 159–61; Barclay to Yeo, 4 June 1813 and 10 July 1813, in Knopf, Anecdotes, 23–24; Brigadier Vincent to Lieutenant General Sir George Prevost, Governor and Military Commander of all Canada, 18 June 1813, Public Archives of Canada; and Brigadier Henry Proctor to Prevost, 11 July 1813, Public Archives of Canada.

17. Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:136; Mahan, Sea Power, 2:62; Dutton, Perry, 86; and Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 98, 99, 116, 131. On carronades, see Spencer C. Tucker, “The Carronade,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 99 (August 1973): 65–70.

18. Dutton, Perry, 98, 105; Tucker, Poltroons and Patriots, 1:316, 317; Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:178; Mahan, Sea Power, 2:72; James C. Mills, Oliver Hazard Perry and the Battle of Lake Erie (Detroit, 1913), 86, 88; Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 108, 109; and Barclay’s narrative in Paullin, Battle of Lake Erie, 161.

19. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 112; and Mills, Perry, 91.

20. Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:203; Mills, Perry, 109; and Dr. Usher Parsons, in Knopf, Anecdotes, 53.

21. Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:210.

22. Mills, Perry, 107; and Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 97.

23. Mahan, Sea Power, 2:51, 55ff, 61.

24. Ibid., 2:71; and Barclay to Yeo, 6 September 1813, in Knopf, Anecdotes, 37. The strength figures come from William James, Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War between Great Britain and the United States, 2 vols. (London, 1818), 292.

25. Mills, Perry, 119, 125.

26. Ibid., 122, 125, 130; Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 133–36, 149, 150; Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:229, 230, 234; Mahan, Sea Power, 2:72; Dutton, Perry, 145, 149, 154; Oliver, “Commodore Perry,” 777; and James H. Ward, Manual of Naval Tactics (New York, 1859), 77.

27. C. S. Forester, The Age of Fighting Sail: The Story of the Naval War of 1812 (New York, 1956), 183; Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:245; Mills, Perry, 130; and Emerson, Perry Victory Centenary, 147.

28. Elliott’s version is carried in full in A Biographical Notice of Commodore Jesse D. Elliott Containing a Review of the Controversy between Him and the Late Commodore Perry (Philadelphia, 1835), 34; Cox, “Eye-Witness Account,” 72; Emerson, Perry Victory Centenary, 158; Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:283; and Mahan, Sea Power, 2:97.

29. Mahan, Sea Power, 2:64, 76; Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:229; Mills, Perry, 145; Oliver, “Commodore Perry,” 777; and Kenneth J. Hagan, ed., In Peace and War (Westport, Conn., 1978), 59.

30. Henry Adams, The War of 1812, edited by H. A. De Weerd (Washington, D.C., 1944), 69.

31. Perry to Secretary of the Navy, 10 September 1813, RG 45, Captains’ Letters; and Perry to Harrison, 10 September 1813, in Logan Esarey, ed., Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1912), 2:539.

32. Perry to Secretary of the Navy, 24 September 1813, RG 45, Captains’ Letters; Harrison to Secretary of War, 9 October 1813, RG 107; Letters received by Secretary of War, National Archives; and Henry Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, to Prevost, 5 November 1815, in House of Lords Sessional Papers, 1815, vol. 4, 332.

33. Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:303; Dutton, Perry, 218; Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 164, 182, 183; Perry to Secretary of Navy, 25 October 1813, RG 45, Captains’ Letters; and Chauncey to Secretary of the Navy, 13 October 1813, RG 45, Captains’ Letters.

34. Quoted in Dudley W. Knox, A History of the United States Navy (New York, 1936), 118.

35. Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:286.

36. Elliott to Perry, 7 July 1818, in Biographical Notice, 207.

37. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 209–11; Mahan, Sea Power, 2:78; and Biographical Notice, 35, 207–13. The charges are printed verbatim in Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 2:251, 252. Elliott published his last attack in Address . . . to His Early Companions (Philadelphia, 1844). The controversy among nineteenth-century writers can be seen in James Fenimore Cooper, History of the Navy of the United States of America, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1840); Paullin, Battle of Lake Erie; and Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry. Compare these with Edward Channing, History of the United States (New York, 1917), 4:521–22.

38. Secretary of the Navy to Perry, 18 April 1814, RG 45, Secretary of the Navy Letters.

39. Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 187, 188; and Robert G. Albion, Makers of Naval Policy 1798–1947 (Annapolis, 1980), 186.

40. Niles, Life of Perry, 270; Park Benjamin, United States Naval Academy (New York, 1900), 94; Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 2:128, 139; and Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, 192–203.

41. J. Robert Moskin, The U.S. Marine Corps Story (New York, 1977), 100, 101.

42. Niles, Life of Perry, 279, 289; and Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 2:197, 206.

43. Niles, Life of Perry, 303, 304.

44. Cox, “Eye-Witness Account”; Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, xii, civ, 27, 88–92, 182, 192; William V. Taylor to his brother, 17 October 1813, in Emerson, Perry Victory Centenary, 157; and Mackenzie, Life of Commodore Perry, 1:76, 229, 2:140, 141.

45. Ellery H. Clark, Jr., “United States Place Names Honoring the Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 74 (April 1948): 452–55, and “Famous Swords at the United States Naval Academy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 66 (December 1940): 1769–75; Ruby R. Duval, “The Perpetuation of History and Tradition at the United States Naval Academy Today,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 64 (May 1938): 660–77; and Emerson, Perry Victory Centenary, 8, 9, 80.

46. Perry to Elliott, 18 June 1818, in Documents in Relation to the Differences Which Subsisted between the Late Commodore O. H. Perry and Captain Jesse D. Elliott (Boston, 1834), 22.

47. Dutton, Perry, 104, 209; Dillon, We Have Met the Enemy, xii-xiv, 181; and Knox, History of United States Navy, 119.

FURTHER READING

NOTES