Jefferson's War (46 page)

 

With tensions running high between America and the Great Powers, Navy Secretary Smith reduced the Mediterranean squadron from three ships to two to hold down costs and to keep as many warships home as possible for coastal defense. He dispatched the
Chesapeake,
under Captain James Barron, and the sloop
Wasp
to relieve the
Constitution, Enterprise,
and
Siren.
The
Wasp
was to sail by way of England and the
Chesapeake
to go straight to Gibraltar.

 

James Barron seldom visited the
Chesapeake
in the weeks before she left Hampton Roads. Had he done so more often, he might have noticed her appalling unreadiness for sea. Likewise, he might have taken to heart British demands to turn over three supposed deserters from the HMS
Melampus,
and he might have noted how British hostility toward him spiked when he ignored those demands.

But Barron didn't observe any of those developments, because he wasn't with his ship. Virginia was his home state, and he was well connected there. Not only was his older brother, Commodore Samuel Barron, one of the highest-ranking naval officers, but their father, James Barron, Sr., was a bona fide war hero. As commander of the Commonwealth of Virginia Navy during the Revolution, the elder Barron had intercepted a letter being carried up Chesapeake Bay to Maryland Governor Robert Eden from Lord George Germain, British secretary of state for the colonies. The letter contained a gleaming nugget of intelligence: a British plan to strike in the Southern colonies. Barron immediately alerted all Southern ports and the commanders of the colonists' coastal fortifications. Not long afterward, Sir Peter Parker appeared with a British invasion force off Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. The defenders were ready for him and repelled his attack. The distractions arising from his being the scion of a famous Virginia military family produced fatal results for James Barron and his crew.

 

 

At 6:00 A.M. on June 22, 1807, the
Chesapeake
glided out of Hampton Roads with her 370 officers and crewmen still struggling to ready her for sea. The crew had never fired the
Chesapeake's
38 guns. They couldn't have if they wanted to. Heaps of lumber clogged the gun deck, few of the powder horns had been filled, and some of the guns were not even secured in their carriages. The disorder evident everywhere made her perilously vulnerable to attack, but battle was the last thing on Barron's mind. He was counting on a peaceful voyage to Gibraltar to give his officers time to put everything in order and train the crew in gunnery. But they already had run out of time.

The
Chesapeake
passed British men-of-war at Lynnhaven Bay on
their first day out. Signals flashed among the British warships, and one of them eased into the Atlantic ahead of the American frigate. That afternoon, 10 miles off Cape Henry, Barron spotted the British ship, the 50-gun HMS
Leopard.
She didn't appear to be going anywhere in particular, but, in fact, to be waiting for the
Chesapeake.
The commander, Captain Salisbury Pryce Humphries, sent over an officer. He presented Barron with the orders Humphries intended to carry out: to search the
Chesapeake
for three deserters. As Barron scrawled a reply—he knew of no such men; his recruiters were instructed not to enlist British deserters—Barron's officers noticed that the
Leopard
had opened her gun ports and the cannons' tampions had been removed. They excitedly reported these ominous developments to Barron. The captain instructed Master Commandant Charles Gordon to send his men to quarters quietly. But before they could clear the gun decks or strike a match, the
Leopard
fired a broadside. As the
Chesapeake
crew frantically tried to clear for action, four more broadsides followed. Then, before his stunned crew could fire a single shot, Barron struck his colors. Three Americans were dead, and eighteen were wounded, including Barron. It had all taken just twenty minutes.

Barron chivalrously offered to surrender his frigate as a prize, but Humphries was interested only in the alleged deserters. His officers removed the three and a fourth man, while Humphries deplored the loss of life and wished matters “might have been adjusted more amicably.” The
Leopard
then sailed away. The
Chesapeake
limped back to Hampton Roads. She would never see Mediterranean duty, nor would the
Wasp.

 

The surprise attack revived the fierce hatred of England that had
propelled America into the Revolution. If the Royal Navy thought nothing of shooting up an American ship a half day's sail from her home port, what was to stop it from landing British troops and reasserting the Crown's hegemony over its former colony? War fever crackled up and down the East Coast and westward into the settlements beyond the Alleghenies. Invasion rumors flew through the seaports. A mob in Norfolk attacked an English sailor. British warships fanned the growing anger and fear by anchoring inside the Virginia Capes and firing indiscriminately at every passing American vessel. Decatur began fitting out four old gunboats to defend the southeast Virginia ports against anticipated British attacks.

Jefferson closed all U.S. seaports to British ships. In England, U.S. Ambassador James Monroe demanded that the British government apologize and agree to stop its impressment of American seamen. The British were willing to apologize, but unwilling to end impressment. With one significant exception, Jefferson's Cabinet and the American people were ready to go to war. A U.S. House committee described the
Chesapeake
attack as “circumstances of indignity and insult, of which there is scarcely to be found a parallel in the history of civilized nations.” “Instant and severe retaliation” was wholly justified.

But Jefferson didn't want to fight. Instead, he chose a curious form of reprisal: terminating all U.S. foreign trade and retreating into isolation. Congress approved the infamous Embargo on Christmas Day 1807. Actually Secretary of State Madison's idea, the Embargo ended all foreign trade and communication; only outbound foreign vessels and authorized U.S. coastal traders were permitted to leave American seaports.

Later in life, Jefferson seemed to have second thoughts about
the Embargo, admitting it cost the United States $50 million in annual exports, while war would have cost only one-third that amount. The strategy rested on the faulty premise that withholding U.S. goods from Europe would hurt Europe more than America. U.S. merchants, however, foresaw that the Embargo would ruin
them,
while having only a slight effect on England and France, the nations it was designed to hurt the most. America's bread-and-butter agricultural staples, which were highly dependent on foreign markets, took a severe beating. Wheat tumbled from $2 a bushel to 7 cents. Warehouses bulged with unsold, unshipped tobacco and cotton. One of the few bright spots was America's finished-goods industry—furniture, clothing, utensils—which thrived as never before in the absence of foreign competition.

The Embargo was impossible to enforce once merchants decided to violate it with impunity whenever they could. Smugglers operated successfully from the East Coast's multitude of bays, inlets, and estuaries. A surprising amount of American goods managed to reach Canada and the West Indies despite vigorous blockading by U.S. naval vessels. The Embargo overshadowed Jefferson's last year as president and his entire second term.

 

Smith instructed Campbell to bring home the three warships remaining in the Mediterranean. With foreign trade shut down, there was no reason to maintain a Mediterranean squadron. Campbell emptied the Malta storehouses and filled the holds of the
Constitution, Hornet,
and
Enterprise
with the stockpiles. The depots at Syracuse, Leghorn, and Gibraltar were liquidated. In the fall of 1807, the three warships left Barbary.

America's Mediterranean naval presence, begun in 1801 with
Commodore Richard Dale's tiny squadron, had ended. It would be eight years before the U.S. Navy would return.

 

The
Chesapeake's
mortified officers requested a court of inquiry. They wanted to clear their names of any “disgrace which must be attached in the late premature surrender ... without their previous knowledge or consent....” They accused Barron of negligence and failing to resist. Had they not begun proceedings, the Navy Department, shocked by Barron's failure to put up a fight, surely would have. Smith relieved Barron of his command and gave it to Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr.—perhaps the origin of the captains' tragic blood feud.

The court of inquiry threw the book at Barron. His guns were unready and ill-equipped. The Marines were supplied cartridges that didn't fit their weapons. During the forty minutes that elapsed before the
Leopard
actually opened fire, Barron had failed to call his crew to general quarters. But most damning of all was the court's conclusion that he struck his flag without a fight; damage to the ship and the crew's injuries did not warrant the surrender.

With these findings, the court-martial outcome was foreordained. Barron's fellow officers found him guilty of negligence of duty and suspended him from the naval service for five years.

 

Captain Edward Preble died on August 25, 1807, in the city of his birth, Portland, Maine, ten days after his forty-sixth birthday. Preble's shaky health had collapsed during a recurrence of the ulcers and assorted stomach ailments that had prevented him from sailing with the first two Mediterranean squadrons. The naval establishment and the nation mourned his death.

The burning of the
Philadelphia
and the naval assaults on Tripoli had made Preble one of the war's larger-than-life figures. His actions were celebrated in paintings and a two-act New York musical,
Tars from Tripoli.
Congress had struck a gold medal stamped with a relief of the August 3, 1804, bombardment, “a testimony to your Country's estimation of the important and honorable services rendered by you....” Before Smith was talked out of stepping down as Navy secretary early in Jefferson's second term, Preble was the rumored successor. Jefferson felt the loss personally, for he and Preble were friends. Once, when Preble sent the president a cask of Mediterranean wine—Jefferson was a wine connoisseur—Jefferson, concerned that the gift might be construed as a sort of bribe, reciprocated by sending Preble a polygraph, a primitive copier consisting of two connected pens.

Preble was buried in Portland with military honors and bells tolling throughout the city before Washington learned of his death. When it did, flags were lowered to half mast on all frigates in the Navy Yard and at the Marine garrison. Beginning at 12:30 P.M. on September 1, a cannon was fired in the Navy Yard every five minutes until 17 minutes before sunset, when 17 minute guns were fired. To this day, Preble's name endures on the hulls of naval vessels and on buildings and monuments along the East Coast.

 

Another man who missed Preble keenly was William Eaton. He and the commodore were faithful correspondents who agreed on matters of great importance to both: the imperative of using military force against Barbary, and in their opinions about Lear, the Barrons, and Rodgers. While both became national celebrities as a result of their Tripoli exploits, Preble's fame was the more lasting,
although Eaton had reveled in the public adulation as the more modest Preble never had.

Eaton's celebrity, however, was on the wane in 1807, with the Barbary War eclipsed by the
Chesapeake
affair and the Embargo, and Eaton himself having fallen from official and public favor. It was a hard landing after the halcyon days of 1805 and 1806, when testimonial dinners followed one after another and Congress had awarded him a brigadier general's pension. Eaton had tarnished his reputation with heavy drinking, boasting, and his relentless vilification of Lear and the Jefferson administration. Senator Plumer had warmly embraced Eaton when he and other Federalists were trying to sink the Tripoli treaty, but now was disgusted with him. Eaton was “an imposter . He is continually vaunting of the glory of his expedition ... And yet if the state of that little affair is examined it will be found trivial in its operations and not affording a single prospect of success.”

One of the few places where Eaton remained a hero was in his hometown, Brimfield, Massachusetts. His loyal neighbors chose him to be justice of the peace of Hampshire County in 1806. They elected him to the Massachusetts legislature in the spring of 1807. He might have passed a quiet middle age among old friends who appreciated him had it not been for Aaron Burr.

 

Vice President Burr's meteoric political career flamed out in July 1804, when he killed Alexander Hamilton at Weehawken, overlooking the Hudson River. He could never run for president, nor would Jefferson—who had thoroughly distrusted Burr even before the duel—tolerate him as a running mate. The month before the duel, the 12th Amendment's ratification had meant the vice president would run as part of a ticket, rather than the
office automatically going to the presidential runner-up. With Governor George Clinton of New York as his 1804 running mate, Jefferson crushed Federalist Party candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the Electoral College, 162—14.

While high political office was closed to him forever, Burr still was arguably the most brilliant lawyer in the land, a man of vast personal charm who might have amassed a fortune and salvaged his name. However, Burr wasn't interested in ordinary bourgeois success; his aspirations were Napoleonic. At the head of an army of disaffected frontiersmen, he was certain he could seize the Spanish-occupied Southwest and Mexico, maybe grab Florida, and, in the process, dismember all the U.S. territories west of the Alleghenies for his personal aggrandizement.