New York at War (21 page)

To counter the threat of an enemy fleet holding Manhattan hostage, Williams proposed a network of new fortifications placed strategically around the Upper Bay. The latest European treatises advocated the erection of multitiered stone batteries, two or three stories in height, encasing parallel lines of cannon. Williams agreed and called for six new stone and mortar citadels: two on Governors Island, one each for Bedloe’s and Ellis islands, one on a rock platform just off the tip of Manhattan (Castle Clinton), and another at the foot of Duane Street a mile up the Hudson. With the outer walls of the main installations hewn of red sandstone blocks up to seven feet thick, these forts would stand ready with their tiers of guns—“heavy metal,” in Williams’s words—to saturate an approaching naval foe with salvos of iron cannonballs, grapeshot, canister, mortar fire, and “hot shot,” prepared in furnaces “for heating balls red hot.” This chain of forts would be able to lay down overlapping fields of artillery fire, deterring the Royal Navy from trying to approach the mouth of the East River or sailing up the Hudson. For the Narrows, the city’s outer portal, Williams called for a line of massive stone blocks to be sunk into the harbor bed, with their tops protruding over the surface of the water. A massive barrier chain would stretch from shore to shore, with artillery at both ends. While one channel would be left free for the passage of friendly vessels, ship hulls would be sunk between the other blocks to prevent enemy entry.
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It was a bold, visionary plan, and many New Yorkers responded enthusiastically. But critics pounced mercilessly. Thomas Paine, for instance, argued that filling the port’s channels with stone blocks might actually dam the tide, leaving the city’s wharves and those of the Hudson Valley high and dry. More crucial was the opposition of Jefferson’s Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, who warned the president that Williams’s “extravagant and inefficient” plan for the Narrows would be too expensive. Gallatin’s scorn scuttled Williams’s Narrows plan. But city and state politicians improvised a funding scheme to pay for the other forts. Williams would get to impose his new, man-made military geography on the rocks and shifting sands of the shorelines of the Upper Bay. Five years of building, during which nothing seemed to quell John Bull’s aggression on the high seas, brought the island and shoreline batteries to completion in the early months of 1812. By that time, James Madison had succeeded Jefferson as president, keeping political control of the country in the hands of the Republicans, who continued to bridle at English chauvinism. By the summer of that fateful year, New Yorkers would be thankful for the fortifications’ presence—and praying that their thick walls and guns would keep an aroused and powerful foe at bay.
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Castle Williams, one of two forts designed by Jonathan Williams on Governors Island, photographed in the early twentieth century. Postcard, Hugh C. Leighton Co., c. 1908. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.

On the morning of June 21, 1812, a squadron of three frigates, a brig, and a sloop of war commanded by Commodore John Rodgers sailed from New York bound for the open Atlantic. The war with Britain that many in New York had long expected had finally been declared by President Madison and Congress. The sailing of the squadron, bent on seizing English merchant ships and thus forcing the Royal Navy to defend British commerce and abandon its strategy of aggression, was the first official act of the War of 1812.
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British seizures and attacks on the high seas had accelerated in the years leading up to the war. Royal Navy cruisers “harass our entering and departing commerce,” Madison had asserted in his war message to Congress; “to the most insulting pretensions they have added the most lawless proceedings in our very harbors.” New Yorkers knew this all too well; during 1811, the frigate
Guerriere
and other Royal Navy vessels had plied the waters off Sandy Hook, looking for Napoleonic privateers, who were raiding British cargo ships, but also taking seamen and passengers off American vessels entering and exiting New York. For some New Yorkers, like those who gathered in City Hall Park to hear patriotic speeches by Revolutionary War veterans, the coming of war was thrilling. The economic embargo imposed by President Jefferson and the Non-Intercourse Act sustained by Madison had avoided war, but they had backfired, bringing economic woe to New York and other ports. War would redeem American honor; restore free trade on the seas to the relief and profit of the nation’s merchants, craftsmen, and farmers; and humble the British foe.
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But many watching the warships sail out to sea frowned rather than cheered. New York’s numerous Federalists—including those who had been elected to a majority on the Common Council, the city’s legislature—largely opposed the war on principle, deriding it as a Jeffersonian adventure to satisfy western and southern “war hawks” lusting for the conquest of British Canada. Many Federalists also feared that the conflict would bring dire consequences to New York City; partners in most of the city’s “large mercantile houses,” for instance, had petitioned the Senate not to declare war. In their South Street counting rooms, worried merchants might admire the courage and bravado of Rodgers’s little fleet, but they also knew that the commodore’s five vessels and 1,500 seamen represented the US Navy’s major concentration of force, while the Royal Navy, the most formidable maritime power on earth, possessed over one thousand ships manned by 146,000 sailors and marines. Indeed, the city’s mayor, De Witt Clinton, sought to ride such fears into the White House. As the Federalist presidential candidate in 1812, this nephew of former New York governor and vice president George Clinton appeared to promise some mixture of firmness and mediation in response to British aggression. He narrowly lost the election to Madison that November, the first New York mayor to harbor presidential ambitions.
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The disparity between the American and British fleets, however, did not daunt New Yorkers who sought employment or profit from the war. By mid-October, twenty-six vessels “fitted out on private speculation” by waterfront merchants, bristling with over two hundred cannon and crowded with over two thousand eager men, had slipped out to sea to prey on British merchantmen. Privateers with jaunty, provocative names—the
Yorktown
, the
Retaliation
, the
Spitfire
—ranged from the coast of Surinam to the Azores and the Orkneys, capturing scores of British merchant vessels. Along with the fledgling Brooklyn Navy Yard established by the federal government in 1802, private shipyards lining the East River built, equipped, and repaired naval vessels. Hundreds of New York shipwrights also journeyed to the shores of lakes Ontario, Erie, and Champlain, where they built flotillas of brigs and gunboats to challenge British supremacy on fresh water.
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Meanwhile, a select group of New Yorkers inaugurated a new role for Manhattan as banker and underwriter to the government’s wartime financial needs. In 1812, the government raised $3 million of its total $13 million in war debt from Manhattan merchants and banks. Shuttling between East River counting houses and Potomac offices, New Yorker Jacob Barker became de facto ambassador between Washington and a Wall Street beginning to flex its financial muscle. (The east end of that thoroughfare was becoming the city’s enclave of banks, insurance offices, and brokerages, the place where waterfront merchants now gathered to invest the profits earned from overseas commerce in bonds and bank shares.) Barker received a fractional commission on every dollar he convinced a fellow creditor to subscribe, not to mention interest on the $100,000 or more of his own money he loaned directly. Other, bigger names in New York’s financial community also jumped in. John Jacob Astor, soon to be America’s first millionaire, played a crucial role in underwriting government paper, selling it to the public and collecting healthy commissions in the process. The success of privateers, shipwrights, and financiers affirmed a time-tested tradition: New Yorkers had a knack for finding the common ground between war and moneymaking.
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Out on the Atlantic, British naval commanders looked westward as they read orders from the admiralty in London and contemplated how best to put them into effect. Curtailing American overseas commerce was a key British strategy for ruining the enemy’s economy and bringing him to terms, and from the onset of war, England brought its vastly superior navy to bear against American shipping, as Manhattan’s merchants had feared. By early July 1812, a squadron of six British warships—HMS
Guerriere
,
Africa
,
Shannon
,
Sparta
,
Belvidera
, and
Aeolus
—sailed with impunity off Sandy Hook and the south shore of Long Island. Within three weeks they had seized fifteen American cargo vessels, among them four schooners and ships that called New York their home port.
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The Royal Navy turned up the heat further the following spring. In May, Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, commander in chief of British forces in North American waters, proclaimed from his Bermuda headquarters a “most strict and rigorous blockade” on New York, Charleston, Savannah, and the mouth of the Mississippi (the Chesapeake and Delaware were already blockaded). By then, the forty-gun
Acasta
, the seventy-four-gun
Valiant
, and four other warships were already in place off the Hook to cut New York’s lifeline of trade. When British commanders did not send “contraband” ships and cargoes to their prize courts in Halifax or Bermuda, they often ransomed them back to New Yorkers. Captain Lloyd of HMS
Plantagenet
made a specialty of this, picking up fishing smacks and small boats off Sandy Hook and selling them back to their owners for $100 or $200. In December 1813, Lloyd hit the jackpot when he stopped a coasting vessel from Philadelphia trying to head into New York. In its hold, Lloyd found a custom-made organ, ordered by vestrymen for Manhattan’s Episcopalian St. John’s Chapel, the place of worship for some of the city’s wealthiest families. Lloyd exacted $2,000 from the church officers in return for delivering the instrument. Such depredations were sufficient to keep many of the city’s oceangoing vessels at home. By September 1813, at least 140 brigs, ships, sloops, and schooners lay idle at their anchorages.
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American naval officers cooped up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard viewed the situation with impatience. True, the few seaworthy vessels at their disposal could not risk a direct confrontation with the concentrated fire power of the British squadron hovering nearby, but an opportunity to raid British merchant ships and thus dampen English enthusiasm for the war was being squandered. At the end of May 1813, Stephen Decatur, already a hero of the naval war against Tripoli in 1804, decided to make a run for it. As commander of a squadron that included the forty-four-gun
United States
, the thirty-eight-gun
Macedonian
, and the eighteen-gun
Hornet
, Decatur gambled that he could slip the ships through New York’s maritime back door—the East River outlet to Long Island Sound, a passage unguarded by the British. To do so, however, he would need to maneuver the ships through the daunting waters of Hell Gate, a strait of treacherously shifting currents that had plagued mariners since Dutch days. The risks of running aground, or of shattering the bottoms of such large ships on Hell Gate’s unforgiving rocks, were real. The unlikelihood of pulling off such a feat was a key reason for the laxness of Royal Navy patrols in western Long Island Sound.

On the night of May 18, the vessels in Decatur’s squadron left their berths and headed up the East River. With luck and seamanship, Decatur got his ships through the gauntlet and out into safer waters. Soon, however, they faced a more formidable obstacle: a Royal Navy squadron of four ships carrying 230 cannon. Outgunned, Decatur sought safe haven at New London, Connecticut, where his flotilla remained bottled up for the rest of the war. To keep the American ships there, and to better police New York’s back door, the British now blockaded the eastern end of Long Island Sound. Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, captain of the seventy-four-gun
Ramillies
, assisted by the
Valiant,
the
Acasta
, and the thirty-eight-gun
Orpheus
, made Gardiner’s Island, off the eastern tip of Long Island, a base from which to patrol the waters between Montauk and Block Island. Over the next year, British sailors freely ranged along the north shore of Long Island, buying provisions from friendly farmers and stealing sheep from unfriendly ones. British naval superiority at New York’s two doorsteps seemed complete.
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