This Day in Naval History (British Invasion Stymied at Plattsburgh)

September 11, 1814—In a war partly caused by British seizure of personnel aboard U.S. vessels, one such victim made good on his vow to “make England remember the day she impressed an American sailor.” 

Outnumbered in ships and men, Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough not only stopped what could have been a ruinous invasion of New York State via Lake Chaplain at the Battle of Plattsburgh, but through his victory gave American negotiators in Belgium a better position to achieve more favorable terms in ending the War of 1812.

Approximately 11,000 of the best, battle-hardened troops from Britain’s Napoleonic Wars had been dispatched to move down from Upper Canada into the Empire State. The movement was both a retaliatory measure (against an American republic that, by the British way of thinking, should have joined them against Napoleon, a dictator who posed a clear and present danger to European security) and a necessity (two-thirds of the British army in Canada were fed by American contractors—mostly Vermonters and New Yorkers who showed no scruple about trading with the enemy during war).

The American flotilla had been so hastily cobbled together that many matches for its guns were discovered to be defective, and the captain of one of its divisions was a mere 16-year-old midshipman. In fact, the makeshift navy possessed “a decided advantage only in their commander,” Henry Adams observed admiringly in his History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison. Still only 30 years old, Macdonough had already lived up to the military and naval legacy of his Delaware family. He had won wide plaudits for his bravery while serving under Stephen Decatur in the expedition against Tripoli’s pirates (the American republic’s first military encounter with the Moslem world).

But his truly formative pre-war experience was in 1810, when he was captured by a British “press gang” and taken aboard a frigate. That night, after securing the clothes of a British seaman, he requested and was granted permission to “overhaul a cutter carrying rum.” Once in the water, instead of going to the cutter, he made for the vessel from which he’d been seized, dodging constant fire sent his way after his ruse had been discovered.

Macdonough’s cunning, daring escape was one of the few acts of American defiance against Britain’s odious impressment policy. Particularly during the all-consuming struggle against Napoleon, the low pay, poor conditions, and near certainty of deadly action led to a severe manpower shortage aboard British vessels. So from 1793 to 1812, British “press gangs” had stopped American ships at sea, taking with them approximately 15,000 sailors. The British government might have been desperate, but even the pretext of plausibility they might have had (e.g., taking men who had deserted the Royal Navy for the American merchant marine) vanished in the case of Macdonough, a native-born American.

As the 23-year-old Theodore Roosevelt described it in his pioneering account, The Naval War of 1812, MacDonough had achieved his victory at Plattsburgh by leaving virtually nothing to chance:

“Not only were his vessels provided with springs, but also with anchors to be used astern in any emergency. The Saratoga was further prepared for a change of wind, or for the necessity of winding ship, by having a kedge planted broad off on each of her bows, with a hawser and preventer hawser (hanging in bights under water) leading from each quarter to the kedge on that side. There had not been time to train the men thoroughly at the guns; and to make these produce their full effect the constant supervision of the officers had to be exerted.”

Having taken all human precautions, he then turned his attention to an otherworldly source. On the morning of battle, he knelt on his ship, the Saratoga, and led his men in prayer.

The battle, completed in under three hours that afternoon, was decisive. The name “Saratoga” proved a good omen, as Plattsburgh, like that earlier American Revolution battle, marked the end of further British designs on the American interior. Sir George Prevost, governor-general of Canada, beat a hasty retreat back to his homebase.

Revenge was doubly sweet for this commander, then. It also represented a stinging comeuppance to British political and military authorities who had expected a cakewalk down Lake Champlain into the Empire State. 

When the news was received in London in mid-October, it arrived at the same time as the British failure to take Baltimore and their defeat at Fort Erie. This “lamentable event to the civilized world,” in the words of the Times of London, undercut the British stance of holding out for status uti possidetis (state of possession) at the bargaining table in Ghent. The American delegation (which included future Secretary of State and President John Quincy Adams) could not move the impressment issue that had been one of the causes of the conflict, but it avoided losing half of Maine, one of the British delegation's demands only a couple of weeks before they heard the news about the military reverses.

This Day in Naval History (Farragut Captures New Orleans for Union)

April 25, 1862—With the Confederacy caught unawares and unprepared, the Union achieved a critical step in one of its major objectives—securing control of the Mississippi River. After a day of peril running his ships past the forts guarding New Orleans, Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut occupied the Crescent City and demanded that civil authorities surrender lest he turn his fleet's guns on them. It was the first in a series of victories that led this old sea dog—who had joined the Navy as a nine-year-old midshipman in the War of 1812, and was 60 when conflict broke out between North and South—to become the greatest naval commander of the Civil War.

I would have been surprised a week and a half ago, when I took the picture here of the Admiral Farragut Memorial in New York’s Madison Square Park, if any passers-by could identify the man depicted. But, when this first great public commission by the famed sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens was unveiled in 1881, it was a far different story. Then, onlookers could have told you that all the highest ranks in the Navy -- rear admiral, vice admiral, and admiral of the Navy—were created by Congress for him; that this native of Tennessee with a wife from Norfolk, Va., had chosen to stay loyal to the Union; and that sometimes the price of this loyalty had been severe.

(One report had it that, as Farragut passed below a New Orleans house, an indignant woman emptied the contents of her chamber pot on his head. That reportedly was the last straw for the city’s Union military governor, General Benjamin Butler, who then issue his infamous order that any woman insulting a Federal serviceman should be regarded as “a woman of the town plying her vocation.”)

The bronze, eight-foot-tall Farragut statue in Madison Square gives an extraordinarily vivid sense of what it must have been like to be this hero at the height of battle—in New Orleans, perhaps, or maybe two years later, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, when, warned that he’d be sailing through a mine-filled harbor, he supposedly barked: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” In this marvelously naturalistic depiction, the bottom of his long jacket is swirling slightly upward, as if caught by a wind. With his binoculars in his hand and his sword at his side, he is searching the horizon, on the lookout for an enemy. The statue is turned south, where the threat to the Union loomed.

The statue shows a leader impossible to regard as irresolute; the statement for which he’s remembered (perhaps apocryphal) hints at someone dismissive of danger to the point of rashness. The Farragut I’ve read about at New Orleans appears far more concerned about casualties—ready to take a risk, true, but only after a careful consideration of the cost. When told by a subordinate that he expected only 100 Federal casualties, Farragut merely responded that he hoped he was right.

Farragut and the Federals had come to believe that the time was right to make a play for New Orleans, and to pray the damage could be staunched. The prize was certainly big enough. Capturing New Orleans turned out to be “the most important event of the War of the Rebellion, with the exception of the fall of Richmond,” according to Commander David Dixon Porter, Farragut’s foster brother (and, in one of those neat twists of history, the man asked by the Navy Department to vouch for his loyalty and skill when the campaign was being planned). It wasn’t just because the Crescent City was the largest in the Confederacy, or that, with a sizable population of non-Southerners and non-slaveholders, it might prove one of the easier cities to turn back toward the Union.

No, New Orleans was also the financial center of King Cotton, an industrial center that could help maintain the Southern war effort, and a transit point that would allow men and materiel to pass unmolested across the Mississippi from west to the east. That rapid, undisturbed movement, if allowed to continue, would enable  the Confederacy to transfer troops easily to the theater of operations where they were needed most.

Amazingly, the Confederate government didn’t carefully consider how to secure this critical seaport. It believed that an attack on the Mississippi would come further up the river. Thinking it highly unlikely that the Union would try to attack the city from the Gulf Coast, it moved ships and whatever men it could spare to points north.

Farragut, however, thought that an attack from the Gulf of Mexico could succeed, telling Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox, “The forts are well down the river; ships could easily run them, and New Orleans itself is undefended.”

It was a shrewd assessment, and Fox and his boss, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, worked mightily to supply Farragut with all he needed in his attempt.

When it came time to take the two points guarding the approach to New Orleans, Fort Jackson and Fort St. Phillip, the flag officer allowed Porter to try out his idea of bombarding the fortifications from mortar boats. After a week of no discernible effect, however, Farragut decided to run his boats past the forts in the early hours of April 24. 

Instead of making the run as planned at 2 am, Farragut’s fleet didn’t launch in earnest for another hour and a half. Once detected, his ships found themselves under fire from the forts: “Imagine all the earthquakes in the world, and all the thunder and lightnings together in a space of two miles, all going off at once,” a participant recalled later. There was another, more unusual menace: fire rafts. In preparation for this possibility, the area around each gun on Farragut's flagship, the Hartford, had been strewn with sand and ashes, so the sailors wouldn’t slip on their own blood. Even so, when the Hartford ran aground, it took all of Farragut's exhorting and all of the ship’s efforts to put out the deathly blaze.

On the 25^th, Farragut surveyed the situation and liked what he saw. The Confederate Navy in the harbor was over as a fighting force. The city’s natives came out in great numbers to shout their defiance, but Farragut knew he had time on his hand, and by the 29^th all resistance in the area was snuffed out.

The loss of New Orleans was a major blow to the Confederacy. Napoleon III of France had been so anxious to dismember the Union that he had been willing to recognize the Confederate government on his own. After Farragut’s victory, however, he would do so only in league with Great Britain, and that became a less and less likely prospect after the Battle of Antietam and Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Moreover, the reign of “King Cotton” was in serious danger with the loss of its great depot; desperately needed beef and supplies could no longer move freely near the coast; and points farther up the Mississippi, such as Vicksburg, were now suddenly, shockingly vulnerable. In another year and a half, Porter and General Ulysses S. Grant would carry out an even more daring collaboration between land and sea forces than the one in which Farragut and Butler had acted to bring down New Orleans. That Vicksburg campaign split the Confederacy again in two--or, as Lincoln so memorably put it, "And so The Father of Waters flows again unvexed to the sea."

This Day in Naval History (The Battle of Lake Erie)

September 10, 1813—In the most harrowing—and, finally, sweetest—of naval triumphs, Oliver Hazard Perry managed to overcome the loss of his flagship, casualties dropping right and left around him, and the bizarre behavior of his chief subordinate to beard the British lion at the Battle of Lake Erie.

Twenty-first century students of history, if they are lucky, may remember one sentence from Perry’s report to General William Henry Harrison on this key victory in the War of 1812: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” (Cartoon readers of a certain age might also recall the parody of this in Walt Kelly’s cartoon Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”)

The battle deserves more attention, however, than simply an entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or an answer to Jeopardy. Perry’s exploits are the kind of stuff inculcated into Annapolis cadets for years as they learn about what military historian John Keegan has called The Face of Battle.

Inveterate readers of this blog might remember my praise of Pierre Berton’s Flames Across the Border: 1813-1814. Sure enough, his chapter on Lake Erie is a gem, capturing the breathless energy of Perry as well as the atmosphere of this engagement, a seesaw engagement similar in atmosphere to how the Duke of Wellington famously described his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo: “a damn near-run thing.”

Begin with the months leading up to it. The Americans needed to gain control of the Detroit River and Lake Erie in order to secure their left flank, move troops to the eastern front and fracture the British-Native American alliance. Thus began a frenetic shipbuilding campaign on both sides.

Perry eventually built ships in Erie—a feat all the more jaw-dropping because the community had only 500 inhabitants and the builders of the ships had to be brought in from places as far afield as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Meadville. Locating this operation there, in what was still wilderness, in an area featuring still-shallow water, was, if you will, a riverboat gamble.

When Perry faced off against his opposite number, Capt. Robert Heriot Barclay, he had nine ships and 54 guns to six ships and 63 guns for the British. That initial advantage to the Americans, however, proved illusory: because of the inexplicable decision of Perry’s subordinate, Lt. Jesse Elliott, not to engage the British more quickly, Perry soon found himself on the Lawrence (so named for his dear friend, James “Don’t Give Up the Ship” Lawrence) facing the combined might of several British ships. At one point, Perry had to abandon the Lawrence, which was battered to a pulp.

At the height of the battle, the legend of “Perry’s Luck” sprang into being. While one man after another (including his second lieutenant, standing right next to him) was struck by enemy fire, Perry remained entirely unscratched. It continued to hold as he boarded the ship headed by Elliott, the Niagara, and took command of it, taking a leaf from Admiral Horatio Nelson’s playbook a decade ago and cutting right through the British line of ships.

Within 15 minutes, it worked. By 3 pm, Perry had won and the Americans were pinching themselves over what they’d accomplished: the first time in history that a British had been defeated and captured intact by the enemy, not to mention the first time an American commander had successfully shifted his flag in the midst of battle.

Perry’s campaign and battle were a victory of improvisation. Somewhat like fellow New Englander Benedict Arnold had done at the Battle of Valcour Island in the American Revolution, Perry had created a makeshift navy that achieved its strategic purpose. None of Perry’s hastily built ships set sail again.

One should not let this opportunity pass without mentioning the contribution of African-Americans to victory. About one-fourth of squadrons on the lake that day were black. Much like George Washington in the American Revolution, Perry overcame his initial opposition to African-Americans in the conflict and came to praise their contribution.