Bold, resourceful, imbued with fighting spirit, Stephen Decatur embodied the youthful élan of the early U.S. Navy and set a template for heroism that to this day inspires those who wear the uniform. The first great American naval hero after John Paul Jones, Decatur enjoyed a meteoric career steeped in adventure and glory. When his life was tragically cut short, the entire nation mourned. Congress adjourned on the day of his funeral, and official Washington from the president on down flocked to the service. In his diary John Quincy Adams lamented the passing of a hero who had galvanized the country and had “illustrated its history and given grace and dignity to its character in the eyes of the world,” a man “as dauntless as breathed in this nation, or on the earth.”
Decatur, as they say, is gone but not forgotten. Yet he is not only not forgotten, he is not really gone, either. For the restless spirit of one of the Navy’s finest still maintains residency at Decatur House, the stately home where he lived all too briefly and died all too soon. The house is of historical significance. It is of architectural significance. And it also happens to have the reputation of being one of the most haunted places in Washington, D.C.
Heroes come and go with the shifting vagaries of generations. But some heroes remain forever—in Stephen Decatur’s case, quite literally.
He came from good seafaring stock. His paternal grandfather was a French naval officer; his father, Stephen Sr., was an American naval officer of some renown in the Revolutionary and early Federal periods. Stephen Decatur Jr. was born in 1779, and the sea called to him early, despite his mother’s earnest attempts to steer him toward a safer career on land. He received his commission as a U.S. Navy midshipman in 1798, and he took to the service with natural ease and abundant enthusiasm. Handsome, strapping, brave, gifted with innate leadership qualities that inspired his peers, Decatur rose rapidly through the ranks.
Early on, he demonstrated a willingness (expected in officers and gentlemen of his day) to take matters of honor seriously. He fought his first duel in 1799, against a merchant captain who had slighted the Navy. It was pistols at dawn, and Decatur, a crack shot, managed to wound rather than kill his adversary, thereby satisfying honor yet sparing a life. Decatur soon was involved in another such showdown, this time serving as the second to a midshipman who got into a scuffle with the secretary to the British governor of Malta. The Englishman was killed in the ensuing duel, and the governor cried out for a murder trial. The U.S. Navy hustled the two officers home.
But Decatur was soon back in the Mediterranean. In 1804, commanding the schooner Enterprise, he became part of Commo. Edward Preble’s squadron in the war against the Tripolitan pirates. The fight had not been going well. The pasha of Tripoli had succeeded in capturing the USS Philadelphia, a thirty-six-gun frigate, the previous October after she had foundered on rocks while on blockade duty. The American warship was now anchored inside Tripoli Harbor buttressing the defenses of the Barbary pirates’ nest. The mission was clear: infiltrate the harbor, destroy the ship, and get out with minimal loss of life. Lieutenant Decatur eagerly volunteered. His Enterprise had captured a Tripolitan ketch, which offered a means of entering the hostile harbor undetected. Commodore Preble approved the plan.
Disguised as Maltese mariners and using a Sicilian harbor pilot as their front man, Decatur and seventy-five handpicked men sailed into the pirates’ lair on February 17, 1804. They were right alongside the Philadelphia before the Tripolitans realized their identity; the alarm shouts came too late. The Americans swarmed over the side. With fist and cutlass and ferocity they recaptured the Philadelphia in five minutes without firing a single shot. They put her to the torch and escaped amid the angry fire of Tripolitan shore batteries and gunboats. Twenty Tripolitans had perished in the deck melee; the remainder ended up overboard, except for one taken prisoner. The mission had succeeded without a single American life lost. Decatur, second to board the Philadelphia and the last to leap from her burning hull, enjoyed a wave of praise. Lord Nelson himself lauded “the most bold and daring act of the age.”
Soon the rising hero was involved in another “bold and daring act.” During the August 1804 bombardment of Tripoli, Decatur, now in command of a gunboat squadron, received the terrible news that his younger brother, Lt. James Decatur, USN, had been murdered by the Turkish captain of a Tripolitan gunboat. The treacherous captain had surrendered his vessel only to shoot young Decatur in the head when he came aboard to formally claim the prize. The older brother’s sorrow was mixed with fury at the outrage; the larger battle now became a matter of personal vengeance as well.
Stephen Decatur took ten of his men and hunted down and boarded the Tripolitan craft; he himself was first over the rail. The deck immediately became the scene of bloody and ferocious close-quarters combat. Through acrid smoke, amid war shouts and clanging steel and booming pistol shots, Decatur spied his quarry: the deceitful captain who had killed his brother. Swinging his cutlass, Decatur hacked his way through to the Turk. The Turk thrust at him with a boarding pike. Decatur parried and slashed. The pike shot forward. Decatur evaded it and sliced down hard on its point, endeavoring to break it. But it was his own cutlass that broke, right at the hilt. Weaponless now, Decatur stood firm, using his arm to deflect the pike. The Turk’s weapon found its mark, piercing Decatur’s arm and chest. Decatur still refused to give in, ripping the pike from his own flesh and wrestling the Turk for it. They fell in a tangle to the deck, with Decatur atop the Turk.
The rival crews surrounded them, vying to assist. A Tripolitan’s scimitar blade sang through the air in a deadly arc for the back of Decatur’s head. Quarter Gunner Reuben James—a veteran of Truxtun’s Constellation crew and the celebrated victories over L’Insurgente and La Vengeance, a participant in Decatur’s burning of the Philadelphia, and a victim that day of two serious wounds already—threw himself forward to intercept the scimitar blade. Reuben James took a gash to the head and saved the life of Stephen Decatur. Remarkably, the brave gunner survived and went on to share in many of Decatur’s future adventures.
But Decatur still had to survive this particular adventure. The big Turk had wrestled his way on top and was now crushing his American foe beneath him. Holding Decatur down with one hand, the Turk reached into his sash with the other and unsheathed a curved yataghan knife designed for close-in killing. As the knife came down, Decatur freed his left hand and grabbed the Turk’s wrist, then freed his right hand and drew his own pistol. A shot rang out, and the Turk fell back dead—with a certain poetic justice by a pistol ball, retribution for the pistol ball with which he had slain Decatur’s brother.
All twenty-four members of the Tripolitan gunboat’s crew were killed or wounded; the Americans suffered four wounded. “I find hand to hand is not child’s play,” recounted Decatur; “’tis kill or be killed.” What would have been condemned as a rash, emotionally driven act of foolhardiness had it failed instead became a bold and exemplary victory. Decatur’s brother was avenged, and Decatur’s star continued to rise. Promoted in recognition for his Philadelphia exploit, he became (and remains), at twenty-five years of age, the youngest captain in U.S. Navy history. Various frigate commands ensued along with, in 1806, marriage to Susan Wheeler, the beautiful daughter of the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia. In addition to his ship commands, Captain Decatur handled many shore duties as well—overseeing gunboat construction, supervising the Gosport Navy Yard, and, in 1808, a task he sought assiduously to avoid: serving as a member on the court-martial of Capt. James Barron.
Barron had been a sort of father figure back in Decatur’s early midshipman days. Now he was on trial for dereliction of duty in the notorious Chesapeake-Leopard affair. The frigate USS Chesapeake had just put out from Hampton Roads on a course for the Mediterranean (where Barron was to be commodore) when the British frigate Leopard halted her on June 22, 1807. Asserting that Royal Navy deserters were on the Chesapeake, the Leopard’s captain demanded the right to search the ship. Barron refused to permit a search of a sovereign American vessel, but he also failed to prepare the Chesapeake for the imminent hostility. The Leopard fired on the American ship, wounding twenty men and killing four. The Chesapeake was forced to strike her colors, and the British boarding party seized four of her crewmen (only one of whom turned out actually to be a deserter from the king’s navy). The ignominious act inflamed Americans; a hue and cry arose that would echo all the way to the opening guns of the War of 1812. After a court of inquiry, Barron was court-martialed, found guilty of negligence in not clearing for action, and suspended from the Navy for five years.
With his career derailed and a wife and five daughters to support, Barron became a crushed and embittered man. And he considered Decatur one of the main court members responsible for the verdict. Decatur had tried to recuse himself precisely because he had already formed a strong (negatively prejudicial) opinion prior to the proceedings. Thus were sown seeds of animosity that would bear tragic fruit thirteen years hence.
But in the meantime, the grand swirl of events continued apace, continually offering Decatur opportunities for further glory. He achieved one of the significant early naval victories in the War of 1812, commanding the frigate United States in a pitched battle against the British frigate Macedonian on October 25, 1812. Outmaneuvering and outsmarting his adversary, Decatur pummeled the Macedonian until her masts were gone, her cannon useless, and her decks awash in blood. The 24-pounders of the United States had fired with such well-coordinated relentlessness that the British, seeing a great wall of flame, thought the American ship was on fire. Toward the end of the war Decatur suffered a rare loss when he attempted to slip the frigate President past the British blockade on January 14, 1815. Even in defeat he was admirably courageous. Chased by four British ships, he managed to disable one of them before finally being cornered and bombarded into submission. The Navy Department praised Decatur’s “brilliant actions . . . even in the moment of surrendering your ship to an enemy’s squadron of vastly superior force.”
The war with the British had barely ended when another Barbary war began heating up, this time thanks to the ravages and ransom demands of the bey of Algiers. Decatur was dispatched to the Mediterranean in May 1815 in command of a nine-ship squadron. By the end of June he had captured two Algerian warships and had engaged in fighting that had seen the death of an Algerian admiral. Decatur delivered stern terms at Algiers and secured a commitment to indemnify American ship losses and return all American prisoners. It was a historic and groundbreaking treaty, and though, as Decatur himself noted, it was “dictated at the mouth of a cannon,” it was a treaty nonetheless. Subsequent calls at Tunis and Tripoli brought similar agreements. Decatur’s show of force had brought an end to long years of Mediterranean brigandage, and he returned to a grateful America, a new chorus of acclamations, and a new nickname: “Conqueror of the Barbary Pirates.”
President James Madison and Congress led the national outpouring of praise for America’s great naval hero. Decatur was cheered and fêted throughout the land. At a banquet in his honor in April 1816, he raised his glass and made a toast that itself became legendary: “Our country. In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, but our country, right or wrong.”
Decatur was the current star ascendant ne plus ultra in the naval ranks, and one of the most distinguished appointments possible now came his way, courtesy of Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Crowninshield. The secretary appointed Decatur to the recently created three-man Board of Navy Commissioners in December 1815. The powerful and influential board was an advisory body that answered directly to the secretary and provided him with naval expertise. To be invited to sit on this board was a rare and supreme honor for an officer, his ultimate validation, in a sense.
The board was headquartered in Washington, and the Decaturs relocated to the capital city with style. They purchased land at the northwest corner of President’s Park, across from the White House, and set out to build their dream home. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the eminent architect who had designed the Capitol and other significant Washington edifices, was commissioned to create the Decaturs’ house. Decatur instructed Latrobe to design a residence for “impressive entertainments.” The elegant three-story brick Federal mansion, completed in 1818, became a focal point of the Washington social scene. The dashing naval hero and his lovely, refined wife became the toast of the city. An invitation to a lavish party at Decatur House was not to be missed. Susan Decatur was emerging as one of the capital’s most popular hostesses. Stephen Decatur was involved in important work for the Navy Department by day and enjoying his celebrity status by night. Life was good.
Then the past came knocking. James Barron was back. Through years of destitution, of attempts at merchant seamanship and inventing, of roaming from country to country in search of a new start, Barron had more and more seen one man as the principal author of all his woes, and that man was the wildly successful Stephen Decatur. Barron had been in Denmark in 1813 when his suspension from the Navy expired. Too penniless to make the voyage home at that time, he finally managed to return in 1818 and started lobbying strenuously for a naval command. But many in the service, Decatur included, saw the delay in Barron’s return—and thus his failure to serve his country during the War of 1812—as yet another mark against him. His entreaties and protests to the Navy Department fell on deaf ears.
To Barron, the earlier injustice of his original sentence was now compounded. In that vexed state he was vulnerable to the scheming of his old friend, Capt. Jesse Elliott, who had his own reasons to loathe Decatur. Elliott filled Barron’s ears with poisonous insinuations that Decatur was the main obstacle to Barron’s attempts to regain a command. Decatur was, in fact, leery of Barron’s abilities at this point, but he was far from being alone in that opinion. Meanwhile Elliott helped conflate Decatur into the role of Barron’s personal Satan. From 1819 to 1820 a letter-writing war between Barron and Decatur grew increasingly hotter.
Decatur wrote, “I should regret the necessity of fighting with any man; but in my opinion, the man who makes arms his profession is not at liberty to decline an invitation.”
Barron replied, “There may be cases of such extraordinary and aggravated insult and injury received by an individual as to render an appeal to arms on his part absolutely necessary. . . . You have hunted me out, have persecuted me with all the power and influence of your office.”
Decatur wrote, “If we fight, it must be of your seeking. . . . I shall pay no further attention to any communication you may make to me, other than a direct call to the field.”
At that, Barron threw down the fateful gauntlet: “Whenever you will consent to meet me on fair and equal grounds, that is, such as two honorable men may consider just and proper, you are to view this as that call.”
The Decaturs’ calendar was full as usual in March 1820. When they hosted a gala reception for President Monroe’s soon-to-be-wed daughter, several guests noticed that their host appeared at times preoccupied, at other times fawningly attentive to his wife. Two nights later the Decaturs attended Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ dinner dance. Swept up in these lofty social engagements, Susan Decatur was impervious to her husband’s recent activities: seeing to their financial affairs, readying his will. If, on their return from the dance, she saw him standing and staring distractedly out the second-floor parlor window, she probably attributed it to grappling over some naval-policy complexity or merely pre-bedtime musings. She would not have known the real reason, for he had assiduously avoided telling her what was to transpire in the morning.
He rose early, bid her farewell, and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to Beale’s Hotel, where he breakfasted with friends. Afterward they climbed into a carriage and rode out to the Bladensburg Dueling Grounds just beyond the city.
Many an affair of honor between Washingtonian gentlemen had been settled at the dueling grounds. The creek that ran through it was known as Blood Run. Decatur and his men met Barron and his men. It was to be pistols at eight paces at 9 AM. The eight paces amounted to a chivalrous concession on Decatur’s part; it was the shortest allowable dueling distance and a boon to the inferior shot. Decatur, a far better marksman than the nearsighted Barron, would have been at greater advantage at the more standard ten paces or farther. As the distance was measured and the duelists took their places, Barron said to Decatur that he hoped they might be better friends if ever they met in the next world. Decatur answered, “I have never been your enemy, sir.”
The count of three was shouted: “Pre-sent! One! Two—”
Pistol fire rocked the morning stillness.
It was said that the shots erupted at precisely the same second, so that only one shot was heard.
Decatur, as in his earlier duel, intended to wound, not kill, thereby serving honor yet sparing a life. He shot Barron in the hip as intended. Barron likewise aimed for the hip, and likewise hit his mark. Both duelists fell to the ground. Barron would survive his wound. Decatur would not.
Doctors on hand rushed to the bleeding adversaries. “I am mortally wounded,” said Decatur, “. . . and wish that I had fallen in defense of my country.”
Friends got him into a carriage and took him home. Decatur did not want his wife to see him in that state and entreated that she be whisked upstairs before he was brought inside. He was carried to his first-floor bedroom and made comfortable, and Susan Decatur, distraught and hysterical, was finally allowed to join him. As the terrible news spread, thousands of Washingtonians filed past the first-floor window to pay their respects to the dying hero. His final hours were filled with ever-intensifying pain. At 10 PM on March 22, 1820, Stephen Decatur, aged forty-one, died in the dream house he and his wife had lived in for only fourteen months.
* * *
Years went by. President’s Park became Lafayette Square, and a city gradually grew up around Decatur House. Susan rented it out for several years, and a series of foreign dignitaries and U.S. secretaries of state occupied it at various times. She sold the house in 1836 and it remained in private hands until 1956. The first private residence to be built on what became Lafayette Square was also the last remaining private residence there when the house passed into the control of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Since the 1960s it has been open to the public as a museum.
And it has long had the notoriety of being vividly and vociferously haunted. Many have resided at Decatur House, but it is said that the original occupant never left. In terms of spectral activity, “It has always been a lively house,” said a Stephen Decatur House and Museum representative, “and it stays that way today.”
Since the year after he died, Stephen Decatur’s ghost has been seen standing at the second-floor parlor window, staring up Connecticut Avenue. So common have the sightings been that a good deal of bogus lore has arisen, erroneous information that continues to be perpetuated by ill-informed ghost-tour guides and in the ghostly literature. The story that a first-floor window in Decatur House was bricked over to stop the ghost from appearing at it, for instance, is entirely false. The first-floor window had been bricked in when the house was originally constructed. Bricked-in windows were a Federal Period architectural flourish. The upstairs window preferred by Decatur’s ghost remains filled with glass, not brick, and is an extremely haunted spot.
To stand at the window where Decatur’s ghost holds his recurrent vigils is to feel a frisson of unease; yet there is a simultaneous, contrasting thrill, the fleeting sense that one of naval history’s most famous figures has just brushed your shoulder. But the window is not the sole ectoplasmic power spot at Decatur House; the nearby second-floor stairway landing—a tight, claustrophobic area—exudes a palpable air of death. Stories abound regarding the space between Decatur’s window and this landing—stories about footsteps, about disembodied voices at night, about inconsolable weeping. The area around the door to the courtyard likewise is infamously haunted, and the first-floor room where Decatur breathed his last breath still radiates a disturbing sorrow.
Some speculate that Decatur’s ghost constantly relives the hours preceding his death: gazing pensively out the window the night before, slipping out the door early the next morning, returning to die amid wailing and tears. If this theory is true, it supports another theory that Decatur’s phantom is one of many sad souls that haunt the former Bladensburg Dueling Grounds. More than fifty duels offered blood sacrifice to the earth there, and the area teems with dark, humanoid shapes drifting about ethereally. The least little sound causes the ghosts to vanish immediately, scattering to other haunts until the coast is clear.
If Decatur’s ghost cavorts among them, he always comes home to die again. Interest in Decatur House’s supernatural blandishments has remained unabated over the years. Ghost investigation television shows and area ghost-hunting societies continue to make the pilgrimage. And for good reason. In a city with more than its share of alleged paranormal activity, Decatur House stands out as a salient spectral hotspot. A shockingly vivid manifestation of Decatur occurred in 2007. The witness, a member of the Decatur House and Museum staff, agreed to be interviewed if her identity was not revealed.
“I’ve never had a parapsychological experience before,” she said. “I don’t believe that sort of thing. . . . But I saw a man.” A man who wasn’t there.
The museum was closed; there were only a few personnel left in the building at that point, and no one was unaccounted for. The witness was in a third-floor office with two open doors—one to the side of her, the other in front and facing into another office, allowing for the sort of room-to-room conversation now going on between the witness and another staffer across the way. Suddenly someone, something, was hovering in the witness’s periphery, in the side entrance. “I was sitting upstairs talking . . . when out of the corner of my eye a man appeared in the doorway.”
The witness said she would never forget the pure, primeval shock of the moment. “I jumped back in my chair. There was nobody up there with us at all.” But right there, standing a mere few feet away and staring right at her, “was a guy. He had dark hair, a dark top and light trousers. . . . When I think about it I get goose-bumps.”
And then he was gone. He simply disappeared. “It was so profound. I can’t talk about it even now without chilling over.” For the witness it was, understandably, a transformative moment. Yet for all the uncanniness of the incident, there was nothing particularly threatening about the ghost. “It wasn’t scary, exactly; it was just very startling.”
Hers was a shockingly lucid encounter, but anyone who works at Decatur House can speak of the abundant signs, the spooky ambience, the voices, the weird noises, the overall sense of the otherworldly permeating these historic walls.
“No one really likes to stay here late,” one staffer remarked. “When it gets eerie and you realize you’re here by yourself, you get out in a hurry.”
But you’re never really here entirely by yourself. You are, in fact, in most illustrious company.