After the defeats along the St. Lawrence and at Niagara, the winter of 1813–14 found the British-American standoff in North America little changed from the year before. True, there had been some limited American successes—the attack on York, the initial capture of Fort George, and Harrison’s defeat of Procter on the Thames—but none of these engagements had been capitalized upon. Even Harrison’s victory had resulted in little more than the recapture of Detroit. Any and all attempts to capture Montreal or extend the Niagara frontier had met with abysmal failure and ended—in the case of Niagara—with an all-out rout.
On the seas and waterways, laurels of victory belonged only to Perry for that September day on Lake Erie. But important though it was to retaking Detroit, it had done nothing to sever the Canadian artery of the St. Lawrence. Americans desperately looked around for some good news. Where were the Constitution and the United States, whose glorious triumphs had so thrilled the American public the year before? Bottled up. Bottled up in American harbors because of an increasingly effective British naval blockade.
The worldly superiority of the Royal Navy had, in fact, appeared to be challenged by the early victories of a few American frigates. But in reality, what the defeats of the Guerrière, Macedonian, and Java did most was raise the hue and cry of the British public to demand that His Majesty’s government increase its naval presence in American waters and crush this upstart foe. The British Admiralty heeded the outcry, and by early 1813 there were ten ships of the line, thirty-eight frigates, and fifty-two smaller vessels operating in American waters—an advantage in capital ships of seven to one over the Americans. The noose was tightening.1
The Admiralty’s January 1813 orders to Admiral Sir John B. Warren, commander of British ships in the North Atlantic and Caribbean, emphasized that it was “of the highest importance to the Character and interests of the Country that the Naval Force of the Enemy should be quickly and completely disposed….” In support of this objective, the Admiralty had withdrawn “Ships from other important Services for the purpose of placing under your orders a force with which you cannot fail to bring the Naval War to a termination, either by the capture of the American National Vessels, or by strictly blockading them in their own Waters.”2
With these additional ships, Warren slowly extended a blockade of the Atlantic coast north from Georgia and the Carolinas to Chesapeake and Delaware bays. By November 1813 the entire eastern coast of the United States south of New England was under a full commercial blockade. New England, while subject to military efforts such as HMS Shannon’s lurking off Boston harbor, was for a time immune from Warren’s full commercial blockade, perhaps to reward it for its pro-British sympathies, but more realistically to allow some neutral trade between Canada and the West Indies. A commercial blockade meant that ships of any flag—even declared neutrals—attempting to cross the blockade were fair game for seizure, because, the accepted principle of international law ran, by endeavoring to defeat the efforts of one belligerent by running the blockade, they made themselves parties to the war.3
If American commerce had suffered during Jefferson’s embargoes, the remainder of it now ground to a standstill. Such domestic trade that still occurred was slowed by the almost abysmal state of the nation’s roadways. Regional shortages or surpluses fueled speculation and inflation. A hundredweight of sugar sold for $9 in New Orleans in August 1813, but commanded almost three times that amount in blockaded Baltimore.4
Naturally, the tightening British blockade had an equally restrictive impact on the movements of America’s minuscule navy. “The British frigates,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt in The Naval War of 1812, “hovered like hawks off every seaport that was known to harbor any fighting craft.” After sinking HMS Java, the Constitution was blockaded in New England ports for most of 1813. Bold Decatur and the United States managed to slip from New York in May 1813, but were soon forced to seek refuge in New London, Connecticut, where they remained. The Constellation spent the entire war blockaded in Norfolk. President and Congress eluded the British blockade for several cruises, but Congress returned after eight months at sea so extensively damaged that she was stripped of her guns and laid up for the rest of the war. Wasp sneaked out of Portsmouth for a cruise, and then there was the Essex.5
One hundred forty feet in length and twenty-six and a half feet in the beam, the Essex was rated a thirty-two-gun frigate, but was crammed with forty thirty-two-pound carronades and six long twelve-pounders. Up close she was a furious fighter, but she was virtually helpless to any opponent skilled enough to hammer away at her from outside the range of her carronades. This fact caused Essex to be so disliked by her captain, David Porter, that he requested a transfer from the ship just prior to departing on the cruise that would make both the ship and her captain minor legends. “My insuperable dislike to Carronades and the bad sailing of the Essex,” wrote Porter to his superiors, “render her in my opinion the worst frigate in the service.”6
Nonetheless, on October 28, 1812, with Porter in command, Essex sailed from the Delaware River to rendezvous with Constitution and Hornet in the Cape Verde Islands. When the ships failed to meet, Porter took liberal interpretation of William Bainbridge’s charge to employ his own discretion in such an event. Accordingly, Porter sailed Essex south and rounded Cape Horn, and she became the first warship to show the American flag in the Pacific Ocean. It was a bold move because much of the Pacific was still considered a Spanish lake and as such allied with Great Britain. But this also meant that it was sparsely patrolled.
Essex first called cautiously at Valparaiso, Chile, and was received cordially because that country was in revolt against Spain and considered itself a neutral. Replenished, Essex sailed for the Galapagos Islands and between April 17 and October 3, 1813, captured twelve British whalers. In an extraordinary show of nationalism, Porter went so far as to establish “Fort Madison” in the islands and claim several of them—despite Ecuadoran ownership—for the United States. It was a harbinger of American interest in the Pacific. Porter even put some of the islands’ famous tortoises in his hold as a handy supply of fresh meat.
By the time Porter and Essex returned to Valparaiso early in January 1814 along with a captured vessel renamed Essex Junior, Porter had heard that three British warships, including the thirty-six-gun frigate HMS Phoebe, were searching for him. On February 8 the Phoebe came gliding into the neutral Chilean harbor and passed within feet of the anchored Essex. Both captains had their guns manned, and it has long been speculated that Phoebe’s captain, James Hillyar, intended to take Essex by surprise despite the neutrality of the port. But finding maneuvering difficult in calm winds and the Essex fully prepared with her short-range carronades, Hillyar quickly availed himself of such neutrality.
In the manner of the time, Porter and Hillyar exchanged pleasantries and renewed acquaintances from days in the Mediterranean. Porter proposed a single-ship duel. Hillyar refused, and several days later put to sea to blockade the port in the company of the eighteen-gun sloop HMS Cherub. On February 27 Phoebe, with Cherub some distance away, fired a signal gun that Porter took to mean Hillyar had had a change of heart about a ship-to-ship encounter. But when Essex emerged from Valparaiso harbor, Phoebe quickly ran downwind to join Cherub and refused to engage.
Finally, on March 27, Porter determined to draw off the two British ships and thus permit Essex Junior to escape the harbor. Despite his earlier criticisms of his ship, Porter had seen enough of his opponents to convince him that Essex was fit enough to outrun both of them. For a time, it looked as if this plan would work, but just as Essex was rounding the outermost point of the harbor, a sudden, heavy squall struck and toppled her main topmast. Porter quickly came about to return to the shelter of the harbor, but in her crippled condition the ship was forced to anchor in a small bay three miles away. Even though Essex was still in the territorial waters of a neutral, Phoebe and Cherub took the occasion to pounce.
Hillyar, too, knew his opponent well, and he used his long guns to inflict significant damage on the stationary vessel while staying out of range of the Essex’s carronades. Porter cut his anchor cable and tried to maneuver Essex close to his attackers, but Essex failed to deliver more than a couple of carronade broadsides against Cherub before the sloop flitted away. Next, Porter tried to run his ship aground and scuttle her. This, too, failed, and Porter was finally forced to strike his flag. Ever after he would claim that Captain Hillyar had observed the courtesies of neutrality when they served his purposes and ignored them when they did not.
From the British side, it was obvious that the Royal Navy was becoming more and more aggressive in dealing with its American antagonists. By the time news reached the United States of both Essex’s early glories and her less than honorable demise, there was other news that promised a far more ominous turn in the war. The United States was soon to have much more to worry about than even the continued tightening of the British blockade or the reassertions of the Royal Navy’s superiority.7
Far removed from the battles on the Thames and St. Lawrence, the face of the War of 1812 changed dramatically in mid-October 1813 in far-off Europe. Only fifteen months after launching a massive invasion of Russia at the height of his power, Napoleon met with defeat at the three-day Battle of the Nations at Leipzig. Great Britain and her continental allies breathed a collective sigh of relief. Their world order was safe. Slowly but surely over the following winter, Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and Swedish forces converged on Paris from the east. Meanwhile, Wellington’s forces on the Iberian Peninsula finally expelled Napoleon’s marshals from Spain and crossed the Pyrenees to invade France from the south. On March 31, 1814, these allies marched into Paris. Less than two weeks later, Napoleon abdicated all of his pretenses at empire and was exiled to Elba.*
With Europe at peace for the first time in more than a decade, the British lion was able at long last to focus its energies on North America. Now, what had those upstart Americans been doing? Back in the summer of 1812, both the Caledonian Mercury of Edinburgh and the London Times had agreed that impressment alone was too “paltry an affair for two great nations to go to war about.”8 But such sentiments had changed. British ships arriving off New England that same summer with the olive branch of Parliament’s repeal of the hated Orders in Council had been seized as the first prizes of war. Next came the humiliating defeats of the Guerrière, Macedonian, and Java. And even if the Americans had been largely inept in execution, they had certainly tried their best to pluck Canada from the British Empire. The lion was getting annoyed. By the spring of 1814, the London Times sang a different tune. “Chastise the savages [Americans],” the newspaper proclaimed, “for such they are, in a much truer sense, than the followers of Tecumseh or the Prophet.”9
At first, many Federalists celebrated Napoleon’s defeat and assumed it would mean a quick reconciliation with Great Britain. Even Republican Thomas Jefferson heralded Napoleon’s downfall, but other Republicans were less than optimistic about an early end to hostilities. The lion’s tail had been twisted too sharply. “I have it much at heart,” confessed the new Royal Navy commander in North America, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, “to give them a complete drubbing before peace is made, when I trust their northern limits will be circumscribed and the command of the Mississippi wrested from them.”10
Having failed to conquer Canada or procure any major maritime concessions from the British in two years of war, the United States was about to spend the final year of the conflict on the defensive. The British lion was now fully engaged and greatly annoyed. The lion’s roar would soon be heard in all corners of North America. “We should have to fight hereafter,” wrote Albert Gallatin’s brother-in-law, Joseph H. Nicholson, to Secretary of the Navy William Jones, “not for ‘free Trade and sailors rights,’ not for the Conquest of the Canadas, but for our national Existence.”11
* Napoleon, of course, would escape from Elba and have one last fling at empire, but by then the British-American war in North America would be over.